The Supreme Court, which is 6 to 3 Republican, has gone out of its way to help President Donald Trump, from permitting him to construct his illegal ballroom and gutting the Voting Rights Act to allowing him to unilaterally fire federal employees who were previously protected by civil service laws. Now the Supreme Court has stayed an injunction to stop Trump from forcing the Postal Service to not count mail-in ballots submitted by any voter Trump disapproves of — and experts are warning it will wreak havoc on American elections.
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“A divided Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to move forward with plans to restrict mail-in voting before the midterm elections,” reported The New York Times’ Abbie VanSickle and Ann E. Marimow on Monday. “In an emergency order, the justices said President Trump could proceed with implementing an executive order he had signed, which directed the U.S. Postal Service to help decide which voters should receive mail-in ballots. Under the executive order, the Department of Homeland Security will also create lists of U.S. citizens that the administration believes could be used to monitor voter rolls for noncitizens.”
They added, “The decision means the administration can move ahead with planning for restricting the use of mail ballots even as a lower court continues to weigh the legality of Mr. Trump’s executive order. But with a little more than two months until Election Day — and considerably less time before early voting begins in many states — it remains unclear whether the White House’s rules will be in effect for a midterm election in which control of both chambers is at stake. Additional legal action is a near certainty with the plan’s fate not yet final. A separate injunction by the same lower court complicates matters. That court action prevents the postal service from implementing some parts of the executive order. That case could also soon be headed to the justices.”
Stephen Richer, legal fellow with the conservative Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, posted on X that while the Supreme Court did not technically rule on the legality of Trump’s executive order controlling elections, they have succeeded in jamming up mail-in voting from the Post Office.3) This doesn’t yet mean EO will be in effect for Nov elections.
“Ironically, if it does come to be in effect, the states best equipped to handle the USPS rule might be the all-mail states,” Richer wrote. “That is, the administrative burden is comparatively simple for states that simply mail a ballot to every registered voter. Those states just need to keep sending full voter registration list to USPS.”
He added, “It will be much harder on the states that have lots of mail voters, but not all mail voters. I gotta imagine that the people who are the least excited about this are USPS employees. This is a massive new administrative lift, and people will blame them for any undelivered mail ballot.”
Democracy Docket’s Jacob Knutson and Jim Saksa both expressed their own disapproval of the Supreme Court issuing this decision using their “shadow docket” and quoted the NAACP’s own scathing take on the decision.
“Voting rights organizations quickly decried the Court’s decision,” Knutson and Saska reported. They then quoted NAACP President Derrick Johnson who said, “Let this ruling be a reminder that democracy is never, ever, guaranteed. Those in power know full well that they are unpopular and will lose in a free and fair election, and so they are trying to do everything they possibly can to make it difficult for you to vote. Trump’s order has nothing to do with election integrity. It has everything to do with maintaining power at all costs.”
Knutson and Sasha added, “Trump has long blamed mail voting for his 2020 electoral loss, calling for a significant curtailing of the practice ever since, despite voting by mail himself. Monday’s decision is just the latest in a series of ‘shadow docket’ rulings in which the Court’s Republican-appointed majority has sided with the Trump administration on emergency appeal.”
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Speaking to CNN, NYU law professor Ryan Goodman warned that the decision will have major ripple effects.
“First, there’s still another injunction against this executive order, and what the Supreme Court did tonight didn’t touch it,” Goodman said. “When the USPS issued its new rule on Friday, they said they’d only put it into effect if both injunctions were removed — and the Supreme Court only removed one of them. Second, what the attorney general said is completely right: the Supreme Court’s ruling wasn’t on the merits. It was only about ripeness — whether the states brought their suit too soon. The whole logic of that argument was that the USPS hadn’t issued its final rule yet. Well, on Friday they issued the rule and said it would be published on Wednesday. That’s what she means when she says they can go straight to court — and the lower courts have already reached the merits.”
He later said that “if this is decided on the merits, Trump loses in court. The lower courts are all basically on the same page, and I think the Supreme Court would be too. The states are the ones that run and regulate our elections — that’s not a role for the president. So this amounts to unconstitutional federal interference in state elections and election processes. That’s if they get to the merits. The only wild card is if the Supreme Court issues some other kind of procedural ruling, but I don’t necessarily see that happening. In fact, I see tonight’s ruling as a bit of a dodge — they dodged the merits and ruled only on the standing issue, on whether the case was brought too soon. And as I mentioned, there’s still another injunction in place — that one wasn’t brought by the states, but by the League of Women Voters, based on the interests of people being disenfranchised.”
Kris Mayes, Arizona’s Attorney General, was more dire in her outlook.
“I think it would cause absolute, total chaos, because the people of my state are literally going to be waiting by their mailbox for that ballot to arrive,” Mayes told CNN on Monday. “Their expectation is that it’ll arrive, they’ll fill it out, and they’ll put it in the mail or drop it in a drop box — that’s how we vote. It’s how we’ve voted in Arizona since 1992, and interestingly enough, it was pioneered here by Republicans. So this is crazy, and we will fight it.”
She also disputed the claim that mail-in balloting is rife with fraud.
“It’s just such a false attack,” Mayes said. “We have strong measures here in Arizona and across the country — strong signature-verification processes. You need to sign the ballot envelope before you send it in, and it goes through a verification process. We also have identification requirements. So it’s just false. The reason so many people in Arizona vote by mail is that it’s convenient and secure, and they know that.”
Speaking with AlterNet in June, Pooja Chaudhuri, Senior Counsel/Deputy Legal Director at Democracy Defenders Fund, warned that Trump’s attempts to curtail mail-in voting is part of a larger effort to steal the 2026 midterm elections.
“I think there are two things to consider,” Chaudhuri explained. “One is that the election is made up of voters, and so the outcome depends on people turning out to the polls and voting. The problem is … the chilling effect on voters.”
Chaudhuri continued, “When voters hear that ICE may be deployed to the polls, that mail-in voting rules are changing close to the election, a lot of voters might say, ‘I’m just not going to go out and vote.’ That could happen in many different ways. There are vulnerable communities — people may come from mixed-status families — they’re US citizens, but they might decide, “I’m not going to vote.” So one aspect is the chilling effect on voters that all of these actions would have.”
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