The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to let the Trump administration overhaul how Americans vote by mail before the November midterms, a significant defeat for a president who has spent years asserting, without evidence, that mail-in ballots are riddled with fraud.
The practical effect is straightforward: mail ballots will keep going out under the rules states already use, while a contested set of new U.S. Postal Service requirements stays frozen as the case continues.
The decision, reported by CBS News and NPR, landed as ballots were already reaching voters in several states.
The order was brief and, as is typical of emergency rulings, unsigned, with no vote count disclosed. The majority wrote only that the government was “unlikely to succeed on the merits” once the litigation runs its course, according to The New York Times.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a member of the court’s conservative majority, agreed with the outcome but set out narrower reasoning of his own.
He allowed that the Postal Service might well have the statutory authority to issue such rules, yet concluded that imposing them this close to the election would be “arbitrary and capricious,” leaving state and local officials too little time to comply, NPR reported. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented and would have let the plan take effect, with Justice Alito arguing that the Postal Service holds broad power to regulate the mail.
At the center of the fight is a rule the Postal Service finalized in August, built on an executive order President Trump signed in late March.
It would have required states to give the agency a list of every voter due to receive a mail ballot —names, addresses, and a barcode—through a new online portal, and to print ballots in postal-approved envelopes. Ballots addressed to anyone not on those lists could be refused. The administration described the changes as limited; Solicitor General D. John Sauer defended them as a safeguard against what he called a “particularly pernicious species of fraud,” CBS News reported. Trump, who has himself voted by mail, has offered no evidence of widespread fraud.
The rule ran into trouble in the courts almost at once.
A federal judge in Boston, Indira Talwani, blocked key parts of it, warning that rolling out the changes fewer than 70 days before the election risked the “disenfranchisement of millions” of eligible mail voters, according to SCOTUSblog; she noted the record held no evidence of mail fraud to justify the rush.
The First Circuit Court of Appeals left her injunction in place on Sept. 10, and a second judge in Washington — Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee — separately found that the Postal Service’s job is to move the mail, not to enroll voters or turn away ballots, Axios reported. Monday’s decision marked the administration’s third trip to the high court on the matter; in an earlier order on Aug. 24, the justices had let the agency keep planning while the rule was not yet final.
Timing was the heart of the dispute.
North Carolina and parts of Wisconsin began mailing ballots in early September, and more states are sending them out this month, NPR reported. Warnings about a late overhaul came from across the political spectrum: Republican election officials in seven states, including heavily vote-by-mail Utah, told the court that a rushed rollout would almost surely breed errors, delays and confusion for voters and officials alike. The demands of the new system were already on display in the states that tried to prepare — the Postal Service initially rejected an envelope design from Leon County, Florida, because a required phrase sat about a hundredth of an inch too close to other text, Axios reported.
The White House defended the effort. A spokesperson, Lauren Bis, told Axios that election officials had “ample time to prepare” for the 2026 election. The administration had framed the requirements in its filings as modest envelope-design and addressee-information rules well within the Postal Service’s mandate — a characterization the challengers, a coalition of roughly two dozen states and the District of Columbia, rejected as an attempt to seize control of election machinery the Constitution leaves to the states and Congress.
For the naturalized citizens and immigrant-community voters CTN serves, the immediate takeaway is stability: the ballots arriving in mailboxes this fall follow the same rules voters used last cycle. But weeks of whiplashing legal developments remind us how quickly the mechanics of voting can be thrown into doubt — and how much clear, in-language information matters in communities where English is a second language and a single confusing mailer can be enough to discourage a lawful vote. The case also carried a New England throughline: the injunction the justices ultimately left standing came out of the federal court in Boston, where much of the litigation has unfolded.
The battle is not finished.
Monday’s order pauses the rule but does not settle whether it is lawful, and the lower courts will keep weighing the executive order’s constitutionality in the months ahead. For now, with Election Day set for Tuesday, Nov. 3, mail voting proceeds as it has before.
Voters with questions about how or when to return a mail ballot can check with their city or town clerk or their state election office, where the 2026 rules, deadlines, and drop-off sites are posted.
This article was originally written in English. Other language versions are produced using AI translation software, and errors are possible — the English version is authoritative. CTN also uses AI to convert text into audio.
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