The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to green-light a new Postal Service rule that would exert control over mail-in ballots ahead of the midterm elections.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani last week issued a temporary restraining order blocking parts of the rule from being implemented.
“With respect to the November 2026 election, the order thus partially nullifies the Postal Service’s efforts to address the risk that the federal mails will be used to perpetrate voter fraud, a particularly pernicious species of fraud that dilutes the votes of lawful voters, prevents election results from reflecting the will of the American people, and undermines ‘public confidence in the integrity of the electoral process,’” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in the application.
While Talwani’s order “allows the Postal Service and the States to continue taking steps to ensure that their envelopes satisfy the rule’s requirements, the order risks sowing confusion and chaos because it makes those preparatory steps voluntary, rather than mandatory,” Sauer wrote.
There is a “grave risk,” Sauer wrote, “that States may not have taken the necessary steps to comply due to the false sense of latitude created by the court’s improper order, potentially depriving those States’ citizens of the ability to vote by mail.”
The filing seeks an immediate stay of Talwani’s order while the case proceeds through the appeals court.
The timing of the request was unexpected, since the administration already had a pending appeal to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and because Talwani was expected to rule Thursday on whether to issue a preliminary injunction.
In her ruling last week, Talwani sided with states and voting rights groups that claimed the rule unlawfully usurped states’ power to regulate their own elections, which would need congressional approval, and left them facing an “impossible” timeline to comply in time for the November elections.
“Through the Final Rule, 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,” she wrote.
It also “requires elections officials to create accounts for a new electronic portal, certify that they have received approval regarding the mail ballot design, and thereafter upload to the USPS portal each voter’s information, including name, address, and a unique intelligent mail barcode,” she noted.
“Based on the record presently before the court, Plaintiff States face irreparable harm where they are required to comply with a likely unconstitutional regulation for which compliance is practically impossible as to the 2026 midterm elections, now little more than two months away,” Talwani wrote.
She said that most states have already ordered their mail ballots and that “some are required by state law to send them to eligible voters as early as next week.” North Carolina is scheduled to begin mailing out ballots Friday.
The states, she added, “have neither time nor funds to design new mail ballots, seek approval of the new designs, order production of mail ballots, update their own election management systems, train election officials to use the USPS portal, and upload citizen data to the portal, all before the midterms.”
While the government has said the measure is necessary to combat voter fraud, Talwani said it had not presented “any evidence regarding fraudulent absentee or mail-in voting.”
The “USPS’s interest in correcting an unsubstantiated problem through likely unconstitutional means is dwarfed by the overwhelming risk of pervasive disenfranchisement of citizens who need access to mail ballots in order to vote,” she wrote.
The rule change came about as the result of an executive order President Donald Trump issued March 31 titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.”
Talwani had signed off on an earlier order in a related case barring the rule from being implemented, but that ruling was overturned last month by the Supreme Court, which found her decision was premature because the rule had not yet been finalized.
“The court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the order will necessarily be lawful. On that score, time will tell,” the court said in an unsigned 6-3 ruling.
The rule was finalized late last month.
In court filings, the government said the changes that are being implemented are “modest.”
The rule simply turns “longstanding recommendations—which many of the Plaintiff States have already adopted at least in part, and some have long advocated for—into requirements,” the government argued.
It added that “this is ultimately a regulation of the U.S. mail, and a modest one at that—not a federal takeover of election administration by the Postal Service. That basic reality undermines virtually all of Plaintiffs’ claims and illustrates why Defendants are likely to succeed on the merits of their appeal.”
