Absentee ballots are being prepared to be mailed on September 17, 2024 at the Wake County Board of Elections in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Alison Joyce | Getty Images
A federal judge on Thursday halted, at least for now, an attempt to implement President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting mail-in voting.
The move stalled the directive for the second time, but only about a week before the first mail-in ballots were scheduled to be sent out for the rapidly approaching midterm elections. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani blocked the government from implementing the order for two weeks.
The case could soon be appealed to the Supreme Court, days after the justices issued a procedural decision allowing the administration to move forward.
Thursday’s ruling came after Democrats and voting rights groups refiled the lawsuit to comply with a recent Supreme Court ruling. The high court’s conservative majority did not rule on the legality of Trump’s executive order, instead arguing that Talwani acted too soon.
Now, the administration has issued formal rules governing whether the U.S. Postal Service will deliver mail-in ballots in each state, effectively restarting the legal battle.
The whip-like legal battle will have a major impact on the midterm elections. Nearly one-third of Americans vote by mail, and election officials argue they don’t have enough time to fix the system to comply with new Postal Service directives.
The Postal Service says it will not deliver mail-in ballots unless each state provides a list of voters who should receive mail-in ballots and formats the envelopes in a specific format.
“Plaintiff states do not have the time or funds to design new mail-in ballots, seek approval for new designs, order production of mail-in ballots, update their own election management systems, train election workers to use the USPS portal, and upload national data to the portal before the midterm elections,” Talwani wrote Thursday.
The White House did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment. A hearing in the case is scheduled for September 3.
“This rule is a clear attempt to interfere in an election that the federal government has no control over, and today a federal court blocked it before this administration could wreak havoc on our elections,” New York Attorney General Letitia James, one of the 20 Democratic attorneys general who filed the lawsuit, said in a statement after the order.
Democrats and voting rights groups say the Postal Service’s request is unconstitutional. They say the Constitution gives states, and in some cases Congress, the power to set election rules, not the president or the Postal Service.
For these reasons, the court blocked President Trump’s first executive order last year that called for changes to election procedures, such as requiring proof of citizenship to register.
The president has long targeted mail-in voting, falsely blaming it for his loss in the 2020 election, even though he himself used it to vote.
A Brookings Institution report published in 2025 found that mail-in voting fraud occurred in only about 4 out of 10 million mail-in ballots cast.
President Trump issued an executive order targeting mail-in voting in March, marking his second election-related executive order since returning to office.
Opponents quickly filed a lawsuit, but the administration argued the claim was premature because it had not issued regulations governing how the order would be implemented. Although the administration won on that basis in the first case in Washington, D.C., Mr. Talwani issued injunctions against implementation of the order for the November midterm elections in two separate cases heard in Boston.
On Monday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority broke one of those holds.
Mr. Talwani, who was appointed to the court by President Barack Obama, reluctantly rescinded the second injunction soon after. The plaintiffs then moved to refile the case, citing the Postal Service’s publication of the final rule, in hopes of winning a more lasting victory.
