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SUPREME COURT WON’T LET USPS ENFORCE TRUMP’S EXECUTIVE ORDER TO BAN MAIL IN VOTING

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There will be a lot of ketchup thrown on White House walls tonight. A huge truck of it will be arriving any minute.

The Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, has stopped the USPS from implementing Donald Trump’s new restrictions on voting by mail.

The new onlne newspaper The Washington Sun:

The Supreme Court on Monday halted the U.S. Postal Service from going forward with a rule pushed by the Trump administration to restrict and change the process for mailing ballots in November’s election.

The 7-2 decision clears the way for states to use mail ballots under their current process, avoiding last-minute requirements that some election officials said would disenfranchise voters. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.

The high court sided with voting rights groups and nearly half the states, which said it would cause a mad scramble for states to comply and, in some cases, it would be impossible within the timeframe of an election now 50 days away.

“Applying the rule in the 2026 elections would be arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in his opinion Monday.

The Trump administration had asked the justices to lift a lower court ruling that blocked key parts of the USPS rule through Election Day on Nov. 3.

The rule stems from an executive order President Donald Trump signed in March that sought to redefine the federal government’s role in the mail-in ballot process. The president has said the policies will help safeguard elections from noncitizen voting — though noncitizen registration is illegal and rare, according to experts.

The rule requires states to submit the name, address and a unique barcode number of every eligible voter to a USPS portal, and then check that each outgoing ballot matches an entry on that list.

The USPS said in its final rule that each outgoing ballot envelope must be scanned individually, with a member of election staff present to oversee the entire process.

It also included an approval process for ballot envelopes, which many states have already purchased for their primaries, along with upgrading systems to comply with a new Intelligent Mail barcode, or IMb, for every ballot.

CNBC:

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee, concurred with the ruling in a statement that said, “there is at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service’s statutory authority.”

“But applying the rule in the 2026 elections would be arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections,” Kavanaugh added. “For that reason, I concur in the denial of the application for stay.”

Two of Kavanaugh’s fellow conservatives on the nine-justice court, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, dissented from the decision to reject a stay of the injunction against the Postal Service rule, which was issued in late August.

That rule, which implemented an executive order issued by Trump in March, established new standards for ballot envelopes and required states to create lists of voters who were eligible to obtain mail ballots.

Monday’s decision by the Supreme Court only prevents the Postal Service’s rule from being used in November’s elections. It is possible that the court will allow the rule to be used in future elections.

But this isn’t really a story about the Post Office. It’s another chapter in Donald Trump’s long-standing war with mail-in voting–a method of voting that he has attacked repeatedly while insisting, without evidence, of widespread fraud, that mailed ballots are an invitation to mail theft. This time the administration tried to use executive power to impose new requirements involving voter-eligibility lists, and specially approved ballot envelopes. The White House calls measures such as these election security. Voting-rights groups call them voter suppression. And states have a simpler objection: since when does a president get to rewrite the rules for how they run their elections?

The last question may be Trump’s biggest problem. Courts have already blocked portions of his election agenda, and now a Supreme Court with a 6-3 majority–including three justices Trump himself appointed–has refused, by a 7-2 vote, to let the Postal Service restrictions take effect while the case continues. That doesn’t mean Trump’s broader campaign to change election rules is dead. Other battles over citizenship requirements, voter identification and federal power remain very much alive. But it does mean that, at least in this round, Trump asked the courts to let him move ahead and got an answer he isn’t particularly famous for enjoying: No.

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