Supreme Court rejects Trump’s plan to limit mail-in voting in midterms

By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — The Supreme Court on Monday rejected President Donald Trump’s controversial plan to change how mail ballots are sent to voters across the country, rebuffing a proposal that election officials warned would have had catastrophic consequences if allowed to take effect for this year’s midterms.

In one of the most significant cases to appear on the court’s quick-turn docket in years, a majority of the justices blocked the procedure that would have given the US Postal Service the unprecedented power to withhold potentially millions of mail ballots. Even some GOP election officials cautioned that the proposal could lead to chaos and mass disenfranchisement.

The court said that the administration “is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge” but offered little explanation in its three-sentence, unsigned order. Conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.

The decision is a significant loss for the president, who for years has railed against mail voting with false allegations of extensive fraud, while continuing to vote by mail himself.

The administration had framed its proposal as a “modest” change to postal regulations intended to protect against that alleged fraud. Trump’s critics, however, described the maneuver as an unconstitutional power grab that the US Postal Service wasn’t even fully prepared to carry out.

CNN has reached out to the White House for comment.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a member of the court’s conservative wing, wrote a concurrence explaining that he thought the proposal may be within the authority of the USPS, but that “state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections.”

That appeared to be a recognition of a flood of briefs from state and local election officials who argued there simply was not time this late in the election process to implement the president’s order. But it also suggested that Kavanaugh could be gettable for the president, along with Alito and Thomas, to try the changes for a future election.

In his dissent, Alito said he didn’t believe the practical concerns of implementing the rule raised by many election officials was enough for the states and voting rights groups that challenged the rule to win.

“The government has a strong interest in enforcing the rule, and implementing it will also ‘en­hance the visibility of Federal Ballot Mail’ in order to better detect election fraud,” Alito wrote. “On the other side of the balance, the plaintiff States invoke the practical ef­fects of implementing the rule close to the midterm elec­tions. I take that problem very seriously, but it is not enough to convince me to deny the application.”

“That Hail Mary pass is unlikely to be successfully completed here,” Alito wrote. “The Postal Service has broad authority to regulate the mail.”

In addition to the Democratic-led states and voting rights groups that challenged the proposal, a bipartisan coalition of election administrators, former governors and others warned the justices about last-minute changes to mail ballot procedures. The Postal Service rule required states to upload mass amounts of data on voters to an online portal that wasn’t yet online. And it required changes to ballot envelopes that had already been purchased, and that an increasing number of states had already begun to drop in the mail.

USPS rule now a dead letter

The Democratic states and voting rights groups that sued over the order praised the court’s decision late Monday.

“Trump’s attempt to sabotage the 2026 elections has failed,” said Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, also a Democrat, said the high court’s decision was a “victory for our democracy and a powerful affirmation of the rule of law.”

The administration argued that the changes were needed to secure the ballots and ensure that only eligible voters receive them. But a coalition of two dozen Democratic-led states and voting groups have described the effort as a power grab by a president who has long falsely alleged widespread voter fraud in mail ballot systems.

In recent decisions on the court’s emergency docket, the court has repeatedly found that the Trump administration is harmed when lower courts block it from implementing controversial policies. But in this case, the court reasoned that the “equitable factors,” that is the potential harm faced by voters, outweighed those concerns.

Filed last week, the high-profile emergency appeal was the third time the Trump administration raced up to the Supreme Court on the policy. In late August, the court allowed the president to proceed, though it did so for technical reasons that had to do with the timing of the lawsuit challenging the policy. A lower federal court blocked the changes from going into effect days later.

Under the Constitution, it is states and Congress that determine voting procedures, not the White House nor the post office.

The president’s order required states to submit lists of eligible voters to the US Postal Service. The agency would be barred from delivering ballots mailed by states to people not on those lists. It also required states to use tracking barcodes on ballot envelopes. And it “prioritized” federal prosecution of state election officials who send or receive ballots to non-citizens or others ineligible to vote.

While the Supreme Court was weighing the legal issues, a Postal Service whistleblower came forward with a stark series of warnings. The whistleblower’s report made clear that not only would one ballot be withheld if there was a problem with the barcode on its envelope, but rather officials would decline to deliver the entire batch of mailings that envelope was a part of. The whistleblower also described a rushed process to stand up an online data sharing system that the person said could make the complicated plan even more vulnerable to potential mass disenfranchisement.

Trump has for years touted conspiracy theories about mail voting as a way to discredit the 2020 presidential election that he lost. But improper voting remains exceedingly rare, and the administration has never provided evidence of widespread fraud on a scale that could influence the outcome of the 2020 election, or any other contest.

Multiple federal courts rejected the proposal. Over the weekend, a US District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump nominee in Washington, DC, became the latest to put the USPS rule on hold for the midterms.

This story has been updated with additional details.

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