The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday to let it enforce an executive order that would restrict mail-in voting, after a federal appeals court kept the order blocked in nearly half the states just months before the November midterm elections.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the justices that a Massachusetts federal judge acted too soon when she struck down key parts of the order, which blocked federal agencies from carrying it out in 23 states and the District of Columbia. Sauer said the order only directs agencies to study changes and has not yet produced a final rule, so no state has suffered harm. 

“The district court preemptively decided that whatever the agencies may choose to do will necessarily be unlawful,” he wrote. He asked the court to pause the injunction while the case moves through the appeals court, and to grant an immediate stay in the meantime.

President Donald Trump signed an order in March that directs the Department of Homeland Security to compile lists of confirmed U.S. citizens in each state and send them to election officials, along with directing the U.S. Postal Service to draft rules on mail-in and absentee ballots. California and 22 other Democratic-led states sued three days after Trump signed the order, arguing the Constitution gives states and Congress, not the president, power over elections.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani ruled in June that the administration lacked power to build its own citizen-voter database and that the Postal Service could not impose new rules on states’ mail ballots by itself. She also found the order’s enforcement language amounted to an improper threat against local election officials. 

In Monday’s filing, the administration leaned on a 2020 case, Trump v. New York, in which the justices threw out a challenge to a separate Trump order on census counts because it was too soon to know how agencies would carry it out. Sauer argued the same logic applies here. The order tells agencies to act only “to the extent feasible and consistent with applicable law.” That wording, he said, means the Postal Service and Homeland Security could still drop or narrow the changes once they finish reviewing public comments and checking what the law allows.

The filing follows a string of fights over how the 2026 midterms will run. Earlier this month, Trump gave a prime-time address reviving his claim that the 2020 election was rigged, this time pointing to China, without providing any new evidence.

The filing also follows a Supreme Court ruling in late June that let states keep counting mail ballots that arrive after Election Day if postmarked on time. 

You can read the full filing below. 

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In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court upheld the right of states to accept mail-in ballots that are postmarked by Election Day, but can arrive up to five days later through the mail system.

The case stems from a lawsuit brought by the Republican National Committee against Mississippi and its Secretary of State, arguing they could not legally count mail ballots that arrive after Election Day, even if they are postmarked on or before that same day. The RNC argued that federal law defines “elections” and “Election Day” as the casting and receiving of ballots by that day.

Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett rejected that argument, stating that “nothing in the federal Election-Day statutes require ballots to be received by election day.”

“The federal Election-Day statutes do not preempt Mississippi’s law because the defining element of an ‘election’ has always been the electorate’s choice of candidate,” wrote Barrett.

Barrett, joined by Justices John Roberts, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Jackson Brown, noted that other federal voting statutes like the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act explicitly say that state law governs when ballots must be received, not the federal government. 

Further, while Congress inserted the phrase “Election Day” and specifies it as a Tuesday in its most recent update, it also allows states to modify that period of voting in response to certain force majeure events, like the COVID-19 pandemic.

While the Constitution requires voting to take place by a certain time, the review of those legally cast votes does not need to conclude at the same time.

“The Constitution requires the ‘Day on which [the electors] shall give their Votes’ to be ‘the same throughout the United States,’ but says nothing about the day for receipt,” wrote Barrett. “The Constitution thus envisions a system in which receipt of votes is necessarily divorced from voting. And it sets the crucial, uniform day as the day of voting while leaving receipt to happen later. The federal Election-Day statutes follow the same pattern.”

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said the ruling upholds the principle that “the election is completed for the voter at the moment they complete their ballot, not the moment that some administrative election official receives that ballot or reviews that ballot.”

It also validates more than a hundred years of state autonomy in setting their own rules regarding the receipt of election ballots.

“This case was about who gets to make that determination,” said Becker. “And as the founders intended, as is clearly laid out in the elections clause of the Constitution, the states get to make that determination about when those ballots should be delivered by the postal service and be counted.”

Still, Becker bemoaned the slow, steady politicization of the issue, and said in conversations many election officials were anxious about the case and relieved to see a victory, albeit a narrow one.

“I’ll be honest with you, in any other era this case should have been a 9-0 [decision],” said Becker. “This is a slam dunk, the states clearly have the authority to do this, they’ve been doing this for decades and decades.”

The ruling likely forecloses major changes to the way states receive or accept mail-in ballots before the midterm elections, but Becker does expect some states to seek legislative changes to align their state laws with the five-day post-election timeline blessed by the court.

14 states and Washington D.C. have state laws that allow any ballot to be received up to five days after Election Day or longer, while more than 30 allow military and overseas ballots to arrive after Election Day. Election experts have said ruling that such ballots were invalid could have upended decades of voting precedent and procedures for American voters at home and abroad.

Michael McNulty, director of Issue One Policy, a nonprofit focused on money in politics and elections, said had the court ruled the other way, it would have created chaos for election administration in more than a dozen states that accept such ballots, forcing them to move ballot receipt deadlines, redesign procedures and conduct large scale voter education campaigns without any additional funding.

The Supreme Court “rightly rejected an attempt to reinterpret federal law to force sweeping last-minute changes to election systems across the country and discard legally cast ballots.”

Pamela Smith, CEO of Verified Voting, a nonprofit focused on promoting secure election technologies, said the ruling should give relief to voters who rely on mail or absentee voting.

“This ruling ensures that a postal delay outside of any voter’s control does not erase a lawfully cast ballot and supports election officials’ ability to capture the will of voters,” said Smith.

Post-election audits and investigations have consistently shown voter fraud in the U.S. is exceedingly rare, and that mail-in ballots are not any more susceptible to fraud than other forms of voting.

Nevertheless, states accepting mail-in ballots past Election Day has been a politically charged subject since the 2020 election, when then-incumbent President Donald Trump was defeated by Joe Biden in part on the strength of late-arriving mail ballots that heavily swung in Biden’s favor.

In the years since, both Trump and the GOP more broadly have cast late arriving mail ballots as inherently suspicious, untrustworthy and opaque.

Those beliefs have persisted.

In their dissent, Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh wrote that the decision “leaves open opportunities for voter fraud that may further undermine Americans’ faith in the integrity of this country’s elections.”

“Mail voting also presents a greater opportunity for voter manipulation, a more vulnerable chain of ballot custody, and a diminished ability to detect improprieties in real time,” Alito wrote on behalf of the minority. “Today’s decision compounds these vulnerabilities. Allowing absentee ballots to pour in over the days and weeks after election day, by which point preliminary election returns are being publicly reported, creates greater opportunity for fraud and risks further undermining the public’s confidence in election integrity.”

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The Supreme Court ruled Monday that collecting phone location data from a geographic area is a Fourth Amendment search, in a decision that both privacy advocates and critics of the ruling say will have vast implications for tech privacy.

The 6-3 ruling in Chatrie v. The United States is a “major win” for privacy under the Fourth Amendment, said one law professor who studies surveillance. And it “will send seismic waves through our Fourth Amendment doctrine” with ramifications “for the foreseeable future,” the dissenting justices wrote. The ruling didn’t fall along some of the traditional lines of justices selected by Republican or Democratic presidents.

Okello Chatrie challenged police’s collection of cell phone data from Google in his bank robbery conviction under a so-called geofence warrant that gleaned insights about his location around the time of the crime. While the Supreme Court punted on the question of whether the specific warrant in his case was proper, it held that the Fourth Amendment’s protections apply to this kind of data collection — and potentially other, future kinds as well.

Among the issues the court debated was whether a generalized collection constitutes a search as defined by the Fourth Amendment’s rights against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” That included questions of whether someone who willingly gives their data to a company like Google retains Fourth Amendment projections for that information, under the “third-party doctrine.”

The majority found that cell location data is substantially similar to cell-site location information addressed in Carpenter v. United States (2018),  where the court similarly held that the government’s collection of this data constitutes a Fourth Amendment search.

In the new opinion, Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the majority, used sweeping language about how the Fourth Amendment might apply as technology advances.

“A new technology should not transform what individuals had reasonably thought they could withhold from the Government,” Kagan wrote for the majority with Justices John Roberts, Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information — even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a concurring opinion, saying that he differed from Kagan’s opinion only in how it arrived at its conclusions, citing the Fourth Amendment’s language about “papers” and “effects”: “As I see it, Mr. Chatrie’s Location History data qualifies as his personal property.”

Justice Samuel Alito wrote for dissenting justices that the court had gone too far in extrapolating protections specified under the Carpenter decision, saying it “will send seismic waves through our Fourth Amendment doctrine” despite not affecting Chatrie’s case.

“As the majority works its way through the question in this case, it makes sweeping proclamations with implications far beyond the specific procedure that the police used here,” Alito said, adding that the decision “all but guarantees that we will be cleaning up debris for the foreseeable future.”

Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University and author of a book about how police use of data threatens personal freedom, said the ruling was big even if it will still be easy for law enforcement to obtain warrants in other ways.

“Chatrie is a major win for Fourth Amendment privacy,” he told CyberScoop. “The Supreme Court did take a significant step today to update the Fourth Amendment in a digital age, and we should be thankful that they did.”

The American Civil Liberties Union also celebrated the ruling.

“The Court’s decision provides critical protection against invasive and overbroad government searches of our personal information,” Brett Max Kaufman, senior counsel with ACLU’s Center for Democracy who helped write a friend of the court briefing on Chatrie’s side, said in a statement to CyberScoop. While Google has changed its system in a way that practically cuts off government requests for future location data, “similar kinds of reverse searches of sensitive data held by other companies will continue to be a threat to privacy. Law enforcement and courts are on notice that new technology does not open up surveillance loopholes, and strict adherence to the Fourth Amendment’s protections is required.”

An attorney who served as Chatrie’s counsel of record said he looked forward to continuing to work on his case.

‘Today the Court decisively held that people have a privacy right in their personal data — no matter how short the timeframe or whether the information is held by a tech company,” Michael Price, Fourth Amendment center litigation director at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, told CyberScoop. “The government cannot sidestep the Fourth Amendment by labeling location history and other cell phone data as ‘third party’ records. The Court definitively recognized that accessing this data is a search that triggers constitutional protections.”

The Center for Democracy and Technology said in a social media post that “for years, police have treated the trail your phone leaves behind as theirs for the taking, but today in Chatrie v. United States, the Supreme Court slammed that door shut.”

But the ruling indicates the need for Congress to make it illegal to purchase data from third party companies without a warrant, said Don Bell, policy counsel of The Constitution Project at the Project on Government Oversight. The subject has become intertwined with the debate over surveillance powers that expired this month.

Updated 6/29/26: with comments from Price, CDT and POGO.

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