Federal Judge Weighs Extending Block on USPS Mail-Ballot Plan as States Begin Sending Ballots
A federal judge in Boston said she had heard "nothing" from the U.S. Postal Service about how it would carry out a plan to regulate mail-in ballots for the midterm elections, as she considered whether to extend her ban on a proposal tied to Donald Trump's executive order on elections.
U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani heard arguments on September 2, 2026 — the day before North Carolina was set to become the first state to begin mailing ballots to voters. A few municipalities in Wisconsin had already sent mail ballots to voters earlier that week. (The Globe and Mail)
The hearing came under tight time pressure. Talwani had imposed a 14-day temporary restraining order the week before to stop the USPS mail-ballot plan from taking effect. That order followed a late-August U.S. Supreme Court ruling that her original June injunction was premature because the Postal Service had not yet published the regulations detailing how it would apply Trump's executive order. The Postal Service published those regulations just before the Supreme Court ruling came down, which led Democrats and voting-rights groups to quickly re-file their lawsuits. (The Globe and Mail)
A temporary restraining order, or TRO, is a short-term court order that freezes a government action while the judge decides whether to issue a longer-lasting injunction. Talwani's June order had barred the administration from implementing Trump's executive order for the November election, ruling the changes came too close to voting. In June, a federal court blocked the Postal Service from implementing the executive order restricting mail voting, preventing both federal agencies and USPS from using the order to interfere with voter rolls or mail ballots. (ACLU) A federal judge had also blocked the USPS proposed restrictions on July 1, 2026, finding they violated a settlement. (Reuters)
The 14-day TRO was set to expire the following week, as more states beyond North Carolina began sending out mail ballots. On August 31, 2026, the federal court denied a stay of the TRO and set a briefing schedule with a September 3 hearing on the pending preliminary injunction motions. (Election Law Blog)
At the September 2 hearing, Michael Velchik, the Department of Justice lawyer representing the Postal Service, said the administration would likely go to the Supreme Court by the end of the week to seek permission to resume implementing the plan. The Trump administration had already asked a U.S. appeals court on September 1 to lift the order blocking the restrictions. (The Globe and Mail; Reuters)
Under the USPS plan, before delivering mail ballots for any state the Postal Service would have to approve the design of the envelopes containing them and require the state to upload a list of voters receiving them to an online portal. Election officials said there was no way they could comply with the Postal Service directives, which could require a complete overhaul of their operations. A whistleblower said the restrictions could discard thousands of legal ballots. (The Globe and Mail; Reuters)
The plaintiffs — Democrats and voting-rights groups — argued the president has no authority to set election rules, a power the U.S. Constitution assigns to the states and, in some cases, to Congress. North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson sued over the new mail-in ballot rule, and trial and appellate courts ruled in his favour, imposing an injunction preventing the order from taking effect. (The Globe and Mail; North Carolina Department of Justice)
A U.S. Court of Appeals order issued July 25, 2026 directed the Postal Service not to transmit mail-in or absentee ballots from any individual voter unless the individual's name appears on a state-specific list. (U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit) The blocked order would have let the Postal Service refuse ballot delivery if states withheld eligible voters' ballots. (Reuters)
Trump has long opposed mail voting and falsely blamed it for his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden, even though he often uses that method to cast his own ballot. (The Globe and Mail)
The broader context here is a procedural chess match in which the Postal Service's timing of its regulatory publication appears to have been calibrated to the Supreme Court's ripeness threshold — the principle that a court will not rule on a dispute until the government has taken concrete action. The Court held Talwani's original injunction premature for lack of finalized regulations; USPS published the regulations immediately before that ruling came down, then the administration moved to resume implementation the moment the procedural objection was satisfied. That sequence left plaintiffs to re-litigate the same substantive questions — presidential authority over election administration, compliance feasibility for state election officials, and the risk of ballot disenfranchisement — under tightened timelines, with ballots already in the mail.
For election administrators and legal practitioners tracking this file, the operative question is whether Talwani converts the TRO into a preliminary injunction before the 14-day window expires, or whether the Supreme Court intervenes at the administration's request and allows the plan to take effect while the underlying constitutional questions remain unresolved. The case also implicates a federalism tension that will be familiar to Canadian observers of the division-of-powers tradition: the plaintiffs' core argument is that election-rule authority resides with the states (and Congress), not the executive branch, a claim that cuts across the same jurisdictional lines that structure Canadian federal-provincial disputes over election administration.
The September 3 hearing on the preliminary injunction motions will be the next inflection point, scheduled as more states prepare to send ballots to voters.
