Supreme Court Blocks Trump's Mail-Voting Rules Ahead of Midterms
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday blocked President Donald Trump's effort to make voting by mail harder in the midterms. The Guardian Trump reacted angrily on Truth Social to the ruling. California Gov. Gavin Newsom celebrated the decision rejecting the plan to restrict mail-in voting.
The plan centered on an executive order on mail voting. An executive order is a formal instruction from the president to federal agencies. It would have required states to redesign mail-in envelopes and to upload lists of voters to the U.S. Postal Service. The Guardian The order led the Postal Service to adopt new rules for states that allow mail voting. The New York Times Those included a Ballot Mail for Federal Elections document issued on August 21, 2026, and a Ballot Mail for Federal Elections Final Rule published at 91 Fed. Reg. 54,966 on August 26, 2026.
The order on Monday followed weeks of overlapping court action. A preliminary injunction, a temporary court order pausing a policy, had barred the federal government from carrying out Section 3 of the executive order at issue in Trump v. California. A separate court injunction barred the Postal Service from carrying out and enforcing its Ballot Mail for Federal Elections Rule. On August 24, 2026, the Supreme Court lifted a judicial hurdle to Trump's mail-in ballot restrictions. Reuters A lower-court judge then blocked the effort to make voting by mail harder while the Supreme Court was also considering the mail-ballot plan.
Election officials had said the proposed requirements were not feasible to implement before ballots started going out. Mail voting now accounts for a large share of the electorate. Researchers at the MIT election lab found that 29 percent of Americans voted by mail in the 2024 presidential election. Roughly one-third of voters cast a mail-in ballot in the 2022 midterms. Democrats were more likely than Republicans to cast a mail-in ballot.
In Nevada, officials pointed to the day-to-day running of the election and to voter communication. Cisco Aguilar is the top election official in Nevada. Officials there plan to run public service announcements to educate voters on the election process. In Wisconsin, officials pointed to delivery deadlines. Wisconsin law requires mail-in ballots to be delivered by the close of polls on Election Day in order to count. The state's April election saw an increase in late-arriving mail ballots. Meagan Wolfe is the administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission. Wolfe advised voters returning ballots by mail to do so at least two weeks before the election. Ann Jacobs is a Democrat on the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which oversees voting in Wisconsin.
Washington state sends every voter a mail-in ballot. More than 20,000 votes were rejected in the state's August primary because they arrived late. Steve Hobbs is the Washington secretary of state.
The broader context here is that this dispute was about calendar and capacity as much as legal authority. Envelope redesigns and voter-list uploads require buying supplies, printing, testing, and coordination with Postal Service processing. It is similar to changing the shipping label after packages are already packed. Late-arrival figures from Wisconsin and Washington show how little margin exists once ballots are in the mail. With nearly three in 10 presidential-election voters using mail in 2024 and a partisan skew in who uses it, any late change to the mechanics carries uneven political effects as well as administrative risk. That combination explains why state officials said the plan could not be done in time, why lower courts intervened twice, and why the Supreme Court's final word before ballot distribution will shape how the midterms are run.
