The Mail-In Ballot Fight Is Right Back Where It Started, With The Trump Administration Taking Another ‘L’

Remember earlier this week, when the Supreme Court’s shadow docket handed Trump his mail-in ballot wish by deciding the blue states had sued too early — that they’d have to wait for the Postal Service to actually finalize its rule before anyone could complain about it? Well. The Postal Service finalized its rule. And we are, perhaps unremarkably, right back where we started.

The Supreme Court lifted the injunction on August 24, lecturing the district court that “[f]ederal courts review final rules, not proposed rules—and certainly not antecedent internal directives to propose a rule.” Two days later, USPS published its Final Rule — the one requiring states to submit their ballot-envelope designs for federal approval, register for a USPS portal, and upload every mail voter’s personal information before the agency will deliver a single ballot. A fresh wave of lawsuits hit within hours: 23 states, D.C., and Pennsylvania’s governor filed a new complaint, and the voting-rights organizations amended theirs. And on August 27, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani — the Obama appointee who has now ruled on this thing more times than she probably cares to count — granted a temporary restraining order freezing the mandatory guts of the rule.

The Court said review the final rule. She reviewed the final rule. Turns out she still thinks it’s unconstitutional.

Talwani’s order found the states likely to win on all three of their core claims: that USPS lacked the authority to issue the rule at all, that it’s unconstitutional to impose these requirements on the states, and that it’s unconstitutional to bar non-compliant election officials from using the mail to send ballots. The Constitution, she noted, hands election administration to the states — and no party could point her to any act of Congress delegating USPS the power to regulate election mail. As she put it, “the USPS is refusing to send mail ballots to eligible voters unless States or local election officials submit their mail ballot envelopes and return envelopes and receive advance approval from the USPS without regard to impending deadlines for the November 3, 2026 election.”

The states, she wrote, face “a likely unconstitutional regulation for which compliance is practically impossible as to the 2026 midterm elections, now little more than two months away.” Most have already ordered their ballots. Some are required by state law to start mailing them next week. They have neither the time nor the money to redesign envelopes, seek federal sign-off, reprint millions of ballots, build new data systems, and train officials on a government portal… all before November, and all to satisfy a rule the government couldn’t defend as lawful.

And on the supposed justification for all of this — the specter of mail-in voter fraud that has haunted Trump since 2020 — Talwani noted that the record “continues to lack any evidence” of it. USPS’s own rule, she pointed out, both claims fraud prevention as its purpose and then disclaims that fraud has any bearing on the rule’s legal grounding.

For its part, the Justice Department is selling the rule as a modest housekeeping measure. “The Postal Service will not determine voter eligibility, ballot content, mailing or receipt deadlines, or ballot-counting procedures,” it argued. “The Rule does not displace a single State election law. And it need not and should not prevent a single voter from voting by mail.” Which is a lovely sentiment, except, you know, a rule that stops ballots from being mailed does, in fact, prevent voters from voting by mail.

The TRO runs 14 days, with a hearing set for September 3 on whether it becomes something more durable. And the DOJ is all but certain to appeal, which means this is headed back up the ladder, quite possibly to the same emergency docket that started the loop.

Earlier: SCOTUS Shadow Docket Hands Trump His Mail-In Ballot Wish, And Justice Jackson Is Having None Of It