The Supreme Court has rejected a petition by the Trump administration to implement changes to the way the U.S. Postal Service handles mail-in ballots for the upcoming 2026 midterm elections, calling it “arbitrary and capricious.”

The 7-2 decision was handed down Monday with little explanation by the court. Writing for the majority, Justice Kentaji Brown Jackson said the administration “is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to the District Court’s preliminary injunction” and had failed to articulate a valid reason for seeking emergency relief from the court.

However, in a concurring statement, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said he believed there was “a fair prospect” that the final USPS final regulation would be within their legal authority and appeared to cite unreasonably short timelines imposed on states and his primary reason for denying the stay.

“But applying the rule in the 2026 elections would be arbitrary and capricious and in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections,” wrote Kavanaugh.

The executive order would have tasked the USPS with verifying  voter citizenship and the validating ballot materials. The order would have created a barcode tracking system for mail ballot envelopes and “State Citizenship Lists” compiled by the Department of Homeland Security.

The order was quickly challenged by states and voting rights organizations, who argued the executive branch had no constitutional authority to dictate how they maintained their voter rolls.

The White House has justified the order by claiming the federal government has “an unavoidable duty” under Article II of the Constitution to maintain confidence in election outcomes by preventing violations of criminal law, including noncitizen voting.

Lower courts disagreed, blocking the executive order from being put in place before November. The petition to the Supreme Court represented the administration’s best and final hope for judicial relief.

As the administration fought the matter in courts, it moved ahead finalizing the USPS rule. A whistleblower complaint alleged that a “rushed” effort by the White House and U.S. Postal Service to install three new restrictive IT systems meant to verify citizenship that could potentially deny thousands of mail-in ballots if the federal government disagrees with states on a voter or ballot’s eligibility.

While Jackson and Kavanaugh’s rationale took up less than half a page, a dissenting opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito and signed by Justice Clarence Thomas was more than 7 pages long.

Alito wrote that he would have granted the Trump administration their request for a stay, allowing the order to be implemented in time for the 2026 elections. He said states and organizations suing the government lacked standing, and dismissed their concerns that implementing the USPS order ahead of the 2026 elections would thwart their ability to educate voters about mail-in voting, calling them “abstract social interests.”

Ahead of the decision, David Becker, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Integrity and Research, told reporters that he doubted members of the Supreme Court majority “want to own the chaos that would ensure” as the USPS, states and voters attempt to navigate changes put in place just months before elections and after many states have begun sending out ballots that do not comply with the proposed rules.

He also said that it would be in line with previous Supreme Court decisions that have recognized state supremacy when it comes to specific election administration authorities, like where and how their citizens vote.

“When they consider issues related to the administration of elections, the casting and counting of ballots, they have sided with the states every time,” said Becker.

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A newly released whistleblower complaint reveals details about the “rushed” effort by the Trump administration and U.S. Postal Service to install three new restrictive IT systems that would potentially deny thousands of mail-in ballots, if the federal government disagrees on their eligibility.

According to the complaint, written by attorneys at the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid and released by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., the individual is a federal employee with “direct knowledge of potentially catastrophic problems” related to USPS’ handling of mail-in ballots for the upcoming 2026 midterm elections.

The person claims that USPS is deploying entirely “new and untested” IT systems, including a new Federal Ballot Mail Portal that would potentially give USPS more control over whether and when voters receive federal mail ballots.

The disclosure describes the portal and other systems as “new IT systems and corresponding protocols [that] will govern the delivery of ballots to voters as soon as the 2026 mid-term federal elections and beyond.” It calls the development process “secretive, rushed, chaotic and fundamentally flawed,” and part of a larger effort by agency leaders to rush implementation of the system ahead of the 2026 elections.

That rush has forced USPS to forgo much of the pre-release testing of those systems to ensure they work as intended and can safely interoperate with other federal systems. As a result, the whistleblower says the portal is so restrictive it can potentially reject large batches of mail-in ballots based on a single identified ballot error.

According to the letter, there are three primary new IT systems USPS is rolling out this election cycle. The Federal Ballot Mail Portal stores both voter names and newly placed ballot barcodes, while a new verification system will compare ballot batch manifests with information in the portal. A third system is described as a new physical barcode sampling verification standard “with a zero percent failure rate.”

“The Whistleblower paints a dire picture of a slapdash software development process as the USPS attempted to create this complex IT system, with multiple points of ballot review, in a matter of weeks,” the letter said. “The very manner in which the project is being developed deviates dangerously from even the most basic software development best practices.”

In all three cases, the onus is explicitly placed on state election officials to resolve discrepancies between federal and state systems.

For example, when the federal government and election officials have different data on batch manifests, which can include tens of thousands of ballots, “election officials will be responsible for resolving any errors purportedly identified in the scan, and for resubmitting the batch manifest – USPS will refuse to accept the ballot batch until the errors are resolved.”

A similarly restrictive approach is described for verifying ballot bar codes.

“As presently designed, if even one bar code on one single ballot in a bulk-mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to properly scan during the verification process, the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the state – effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed to voters,” the letter stated.

But the whistleblower said those kinds of small errors are likely to happen in any process that relies on scanning barcodes. In this case, the rushed development and specific location of the barcodes on federal mail ballots means the portal “will almost certainly have significant operating problems.”

The letter says the whistleblower is aware of concerns “among those whose job it is to build this software” that the project is not subject to standard testing and debugging work, and that the systems were escalated to other testing environments before they were even finished. It also claims that the systems’ development was siloed across different teams, with no time to test different software components individually or the system as a whole.

The whistleblower also claims that the USPS rule changes,  which have been subject to multiple court injunctions, have continued throughout, in violation of federal court orders. Despite those orders, the agency is believed to have started work on the IT systems in June 2026.

In response, Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform led by Robert Garcia, D-Calif., wrote to Postmaster General David Steiner saying the disclosures indicate the new IT systems are “faulty” and demanding USPS “immediately cease implementation of this irresponsible and illegal scheme.”

“To be clear, any actions taken by the Postal Service that prevent any registered voter, let alone millions, from voting are unacceptable, a violation of Americans’ voting rights, and likely illegal,” the members wrote.

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said the disclosures could potentially lead to new lawsuits against USPS and the federal government.

“This seems to confirm that the USPS is totally unprepared and unqualified to take on this vast responsibility interjecting itself into state’s mail voting processes,” said Becker on Bluesky. “And could incur liability if USPS truly plans to reject thousands of ballots if there’s even one error.”

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The ruling is part of Anthropic's legal battle against the Pentagon after the government labeled the company as a supply chain risk earlier this year.

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A class action lawsuit filed by victims of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) accuses xAI of training Grok’s synthetic deepfake “nudify” capabilities on real images and videos of child abuse.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, names Jane Doe 1 and other anonymous individuals as plaintiffs, calling Doe “an identified victim of child pornography tracked by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Child Exploitation Notification Program.”

Doe was a pre-school aged child when her perpetrator’s abuse began and continued for years, for the explicit purpose of making CSAM material to distribute online. Media depicting the victim has circulated online since at least the early 2000’s, with, according to the lawsuit “hundreds of thousands of files” being included in law enforcement submissions to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC).

As part of the FBI’s program, she still receives updates when images related to her abuse surface online, and the suit alleges her material has “well known hash-values” that have shown up in deepfakes created with Grok and spread on X.

“CSAM depicting Plaintiff has been found on xAI as part of investigative reporting, takedown request efforts, and criminal investigations, arrests, and convictions for violations of state and federal laws,” the lawsuit states. It also claims “xAI, using Grok, has generated images depicting Plaintiff and the child pornography series in which she is the victim.”

The lawsuit cites “Masha’s Law” as the basis for its allegations. That law, passed in 2018,  protects civil legal remedies to victims of child pornography and online exploitation.

According to an analysis by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, during an 11-day period between Dec. 2025 and Jan. 2026, Grok created more than 3 million sexualized images, at least 23,000 of which appeared to depict children.

On Jan. 14, after the period tracked by the center, Musk wrote on X that he was “not aware of any naked underage images of Grok. Literally zero.” Must also implied that users, not his technology, were primarily responsible for images created using Grok while simultaneously claiming the model “will refuse to produce anything illegal” if asked.

The suit claims that while other competitors enacted guardrails to prevent their AI models from generating “nudified” images of adults and children, xAI “did the opposite,” embedding Grok and it’s deepfake capabilities directly into X, effectively creating an instantaneous CSAM generation and distribution system for the internet.

While xAI said it built in guardrails to prevent Grok from creating deepfake sexualized images, the suit notes that they are “very weak,” diverge from standard industry best practice and can be easily circumvented.

The system rejects prompt prompts where the chatbot detects “clear intent by the user in the phrasing of their request,” the complaint stated. “Indirect or euphemistic prompts can easily slip past a text-based filter, so if the model retains the underlying capability to generate sexual or abusive content, some volume of CSAM becomes effectively inevitably generated by the system.”

The lawsuit also notes that Grok’s terms of service treat anything that gets posted on X as training material, meaning any CSAM material posted on the site over the past year was likely ingested by the model.

The alleged victims are asking for monetary damages along with injunctions to prevent Grok from creating additional harm through future sexualized deepfakes or CSAM. The suit lists “thousands” of members in the class, all with similar claims against xAI.

A request for comment on the lawsuit sent to xAI was not returned.

Grok’s nudification capabilities, and xAI owner Elon Musk’s dismissive public attitude around the fallout have led to international outrage, criminal investigations and a wave of private lawsuits against the company.

Another lawsuit against X filed earlier this year claims that a man used Grok to generate thousands of instances deepfake CSAM material of his stepdaughter. That lawsuit also claims xAI withheld information from law enforcement authorities that would have helped them identify the stepfather as the perpetrator. Days after authorities traced and seized the material on the wte, he committed suicide.

In July, Musk sued Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison over a new state law that bans nudification technology and impose a $500,000 fine for each instance where an AI tool is used to generate or alter an image in a sexually explicit way. Musk’s lawsuit claims the ban violates the First Amendment.

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