Court Halts New Federal Mail-Ballot Requirements Ahead of Midterms

Election officials and voting-rights advocates argued that putting the changes into effect so close to Election Day would disrupt ballot distribution and could prevent eligible voters from receiving or returning ballots in time. Ballots have already been mailed in at least some states, including North Carolina and Alabama. (Tell Us USA Ai image)

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	The court did not disclose a formal vote count in its unsigned order, issued through the court’s emergency docket. The immediate result is that the federal rule cannot be enforced for the 2026 midterms while litigation continues.
	Court Halts New Federal Mail-Ballot Requirements Ahead of Midterms Marc Kennedy - National-Politics Tell Us USA News Network WASHINGTON - The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to let the Trump administration immediately enforce new U.S. Postal Service requirements for mail-in ballots, leaving a lower-court injunction in place less than two months before the November midterm elections. In a brief unsigned emergency order issued Monday, the court said the federal government was unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to the preliminary injunction imposed by a federal judge in Boston. The ruling means states and local election offices may continue using their existing vote-by-mail procedures while the broader legal dispute proceeds. The administration had asked the justices to lift the nationwide block on a recently finalized USPS rule that would have required mail-ballot envelopes to meet new design and tracking standards. Among other provisions, the rule called for unique barcodes on envelopes and required state and local election officials to submit information on mail-ballot recipients through a USPS online portal. Election officials and voting-rights advocates argued that putting the changes into effect so close to Election Day would disrupt ballot distribution and could prevent eligible voters from receiving or returning ballots in time. Ballots have already been mailed in at least some states, including North Carolina and Alabama. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote separately to concur with the court’s decision. He said state and local election officials did not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the new rule before the election, according to reports on the order. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented. They argued that the states challenging the policy were unlikely to establish that the USPS rule was unlawful. The court did not disclose a formal vote count in its unsigned order, issued through the court’s emergency docket. The immediate result is that the federal rule cannot be enforced for the 2026 midterms while litigation continues. Monday’s decision reverses the administration’s recent momentum in related litigation. In August, the Supreme Court lifted an earlier injunction against parts of President Donald Trump’s mail-voting executive order, finding at that stage that the states’ challenge was premature because the government had not yet taken concrete implementing actions. The court emphasized then that its ruling did not decide whether any eventual federal measures would be lawful. After the USPS finalized its implementing rule, states and voting-rights groups renewed their legal challenge. A federal district judge blocked the rule, and the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to pause that injunction before the Supreme Court acted. The appeals court cited the risk of voter disenfranchisement if the rules were imposed during the active election period. The decision does not permanently strike down the Postal Service rule or resolve the wider dispute over the administration’s authority to impose new mail-voting requirements. Instead, it preserves the status quo for this year’s elections and returns the underlying case to the lower courts. For voters, the practical effect is that states can continue administering mail and absentee voting under their current systems rather than switching to the proposed USPS envelope, barcode and data-submission requirements during the final stretch of the midterm campaign.