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 U.S. Postal Service is moving forward with mail-in ballot restrictions, following a court’s rejection of a request by voting rights groups to immediately block an executive order from President Donald Trump ordering the changes.

A new regulation proposed last Friday seeks to apply “uniform standards for the mailing of absentee ballots to and from voters,” including new ballot envelope standards with unique barcodes, election mail logos and other changes that would allow the federal government unprecedented abilities to track – and halt – the movement of mail-in ballots across the country.

Trump has long argued that mail-in ballots facilitated election fraud in 2020 that cost him the presidency, though election experts, election officials and even some Trump allies have dismissed those claims as baseless.

According to the proposed rule, these changes would allow USPS to follow ballots at a granular and individual level, something critics have said will make it easier for the Trump administration to meddle with their delivery.

“Uniquely serialized [barcodes] facilitate the tracking of individual pieces of Ballot Mail to and from individual voters as the barcodes are scanned on the Postal Service’s mail processing equipment,” the proposed rule states.

Trump’s executive order, issued in March, would require states to send the federal government a list of all voters eligible to vote by mail prior to USPS mailing them ballots. The federal government has indicated that it plans to cross-check those voters with data from the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice.

The proposed rule says that after states submit their list of eligible mail-in and absentee voters, USPS will “compile” the information and then provide a “Mail-In and Absentee Participation List” back to them. The Postal Service said it “would not change the information provided by states” when compiling the return list. 

Further, the proposed regulation also includes new “verification” procedures that could potentially place USPS above states in deciding which voters are eligible to receive ballots. This would include having the USPS “confirm that a state submitted a list consistent with the conditions laid out in the proposed rule, and that the outbound ballot mail, and thus the blank ballot that could be returned by mail, is destined to individuals on the list, by checking the barcodes.”

The rule claims that USPS “would not verify whether individuals should be included” on state lists and that states retain “full control over the content of that list.”

However, the White House’s March order also instructed the Department of Justice to prioritize the investigation and prosecution of state and local officials or any others involved in the administration of federal elections who issue federal ballots to individuals not eligible to vote in a federal election.

That order was immediately challenged through lawsuits in multiple federal courts, where many of the White House’s plans to take greater control of elections have fallen short. That includes a lawsuit brought by Democrats and nonprofits in Washington.

While Judge Carl Nichols declined to halt the order, that decision was made on strictly procedural grounds, and he indicated the plaintiffs could be in a better position to prove their case later.

“The Court recognizes that the Postal Service may ultimately issue a final rule that directly affects Plaintiffs or their members, or that the Government may develop State Citizenship Lists that omit specific individuals due to particularized flaws,” Nichols wrote. “Plaintiffs may, of course, renew their motions if and when those future actions occur. Until then, however, Plaintiffs cannot show that preliminary injunctive relief is warranted.”

A separate federal lawsuit challenging the order in Massachusetts remains ongoing.

Alexandra Chandler, director of Free and Fair Elections at nonprofit Protect Democracy, noted that USPS and the federal government have no constitutional authority to regulate how states administer their elections, including micromanaging voter roll maintenance.

While the proposed regulation claims USPS will not overrule states on a voter’s eligibility to receive mail-in or absentee ballots, it’s also peppered with caveats and exceptions that could allow USPS to do just that if they determine it is part of their obligation to uphold federal laws or assist law enforcement investigations.

The rule states that USPS “assumes no responsibility for any outbound ballot mailing” until its accepted into the mail, and is “not responsible for service delays” whenever preparation or entry standards aren’t met.

Chandler called the proposed rule a clear attempt to disrupt election processes, sow distrust in elections among voters and lay “the groundwork to disrupt ballot delivery in real time, create fodder for false investigations and prosecutions, and to contest the midterms after the fact.”

“The administration is trying to turn postal workers into de facto election auditors with the power to decide whether people’s votes get counted while at the same time building an entire federal voter data and technical infrastructure it has no legal authority to create,” Chandler said.

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