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The US Supreme Court will allow Donald Trump to place restrictions on mail-in voting ahead of November’s midterms when critical races could shake up the balance of power in Congress.
The court on Monday agreed to pause a federal judge’s order blocking the president’s directive to the US Postal Service that it must limit mail-in ballots to people on a newly created federal list of eligible voters, saying the order “makes no demand” of the states that challenged the plan and thus would not “concretely harm them”.
“The court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the government to implement the order will necessarily be lawful,” the ruling reads. “On that score, time will tell.”
Trump in March issued an executive order mandating the creation of a federal list of eligible voters and directed the postal service to limit mail ballot deliveries to those people. He also ordered the federal government to withhold funding from states that do not implement the measures.
Some 23 states sued to block the order, saying the president has no authority to unilaterally mandate a change of their election procedures, which are governed by states, not the federal government.
The top court’s ruling is a temporary boost for Trump’s quest to remake US election rules after pushing false claims of widespread voter fraud in the years following his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, although it does not guarantee the president’s efforts will go into effect by election day.
The administration’s application for an emergency ruling focused only on whether the states’ challenge was brought prematurely, not whether the president’s new rules were lawful.
The White House told the court that letting the block stand would undermine executive power and prevent the implementation of the president’s order this autumn.
“Even if the agencies’ implementation plans end up being entirely lawful, there will not be sufficient time to obtain appellate relief before the November election,” wrote solicitor-general John Sauer.
Sauer said this was “especially true” because Trump’s executive order would need to start being implemented as soon as August, as absentee and mail-in voting begins weeks before election day in several states. A group of 12 other states, led by Alabama, joined the case in the president’s defence.
Attorneys for the states opposing Trump’s order said letting the president’s directive take effect would allow the federal government to quickly enact an “unprecedented, legally indefensible voter-verification and ballot-interception programme”.
They added this would give the postal service “far-reaching new powers and responsibilities” and would force states to assemble lists and redesign ballot mail just weeks before early voting begins.
“The consequences of allowing such transformative changes to take effect so close to this fall’s elections would be extreme,” the states’ attorneys wrote.
The Supreme Court’s three liberal justices dissented with Monday’s order. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, wrote in a dissenting opinion that it “does not address whether the president’s attempts to interfere with states’ administration of the November 2026 elections are lawful” but that the states should not be made to wait to challenge “the precise contours of a final rule”.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the decision “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections”.
