The US Supreme Court ruled on Monday that President Donald Trump’s executive order imposing severe restrictions on voting by mail ahead of November’s midterms can proceed. While a nationwide injunction preventing the US Postal Service from implementing the order remains in place, election officials and experts believe Monday’s ruling could still result in chaos and voters being disenfranchised.
The Supreme Court ruling, which split along ideological lines, paused an injunction by a federal judge in Boston that prevented the Trump administration from applying provisions of the executive order to 23 states, along with the District of Columbia.
The court didn’t rule on the legality of the order, which seeks to impose federal oversight on elections that are, under the Constitution, controlled by states. The conservative majority ruled, rather, that the states that brought the lawsuit did not have standing because they could not show actual damage caused by the order.
“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,” the majority wrote in an unsigned opinion. “On that score, time will tell.”
The executive order is predicated on the baseless allegations pushed by Trump and his allies that widespread mail-in voter fraud has altered the outcomes of recent elections. (To put the claims in perspective, a database of supposed voter fraud incidents, maintained by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and dating back to 1980, contains fewer than 100 proven examples of noncitizen voting of any sort.) Experts and election officials have long warned that if implemented in full, the executive order would disenfranchise millions of voters. In a blistering dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson agreed, writing that the ruling could create a “Kafkaesque nightmare [that] needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.”
Despite the possibly temporary nature of this victory, election denial groups cheered the result as a major victory for so-called election integrity efforts. And experts worry that even if Trump’s executive order is eventually blocked, the decision will still have a direct impact on voter turnout in November by sowing doubts about the legitimacy of mail-in voting.
“Voting rights organizations have experienced first-hand the significant confusion that President Trump’s executive order is causing right now,” the counsel and plaintiffs in a second lawsuit against Trump’s executive order wrote in a statement on Monday. “With the November election right around the corner, nonpartisan voting rights groups should be fully engaged in the vital work of educating all eligible voters to prepare to cast their ballots. Instead, plaintiffs and similar organizations are scrambling to understand how the rules may change while fielding inquiries from voters who rely on mail ballots and who are confused and fearful about how they will exercise their right to vote.”
The Executive Order
Almost one third of US voters cast their ballots by mail, including around one in four Republican voters. (Trump himself voted by mail in this year’s GOP primary in Florida.) In eight states, more than 70 percent of ballots were cast by mail during the 2024 elections.
Despite years of false claims from Trump and his allies about widespread mail-in voter fraud, there is no evidence to back up those claims. But in March, Trump signed an executive order titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.” The order contains three distinct provisions.
The first directs the Department of Homeland Security to compile a “State Citizenship List” of individuals confirmed to be US citizens and deemed eligible to vote in each state. The list would be compiled from Social Security Administration records, Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) data, and federal citizenship and naturalization records. The list would need to be sent to states 60 days before the election. That date is Friday, September 4—just 11 days after the Supreme Court ruling.
“This would create a parallel federal eligibility infrastructure on top of existing state voter rolls,” Issue One, a nonprofit seeking to reduce the role of money in politics, wrote shortly after the order was issued.
The second provision targets election officials by demanding that the US attorney general “prioritize the investigation and, as appropriate, the prosecution of State and local officials … who issue Federal ballots to individuals not eligible to vote in a Federal election.”
The final provision in the order directs the USPS to create new rules for absentee and mail-in ballots. Under the rules, states would need to provide the USPS with a list of voters they intend to send ballots to. The order prevents the USPS from sending ballots to anyone not on the list. This rule would require the printing of millions of new ballot envelopes with trackable barcodes.
Last week, before the Supreme Court ruling was issued, the USPS issued a 95-page final rule explaining how it plans to enforce Trump’s proposed changes to mail-in voting in order to “reduce the risk of fraud, and help protect the integrity of federal elections.” The rule compares mail-in ballots to fake bombs or cremated animal remains. The New York Times reported on Monday that Trump is seeking to take control over the USPS board by stacking it with members who have questioned the outcome of the 2020 election.
The provisions of the executive order were mostly blocked by federal courts before the Trump administration appealed the rulings to the Supreme Court in July. Earlier this month, the administration pushed the court to issue a ruling quickly, claiming that failing to do so would cause “irreparable harm to the federal government, the public, and election integrity.”
While the states are likely to file another lawsuit once the USPS rule goes into effect on Wednesday, the Supreme Court decision will still likely cause disruption, given how close the general election is.
“The Court seemed to create complete chaos leading up to the midterm elections, waiting weeks after an administration filing, and just days before mail ballots go out, to completely rewrite the rules of the election,” David Becker, the head of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former Justice Department lawyer, wrote in an emailed statement.
That chaos will hit election officials the hardest.
“From a strictly practical perspective, there simply is just not enough time to implement the proposed requirements for the 2026 general election,” Stuart Holmes, director of elections in Washington state, tells WIRED.
Holmes said that county election offices already have ballot packet mailing materials printed and ready to mail, and that destroying and reprinting them is not realistic, financially or otherwise. The USPS rules would also require new envelope designs, which would in turn need to be reviewed and approved by the USPS to ensure compliance with their automation equipment.
“Even if new designs could be developed and approved in time, it is unrealistic to expect the limited number of printing vendors serving Washington’s counties to produce entirely new supplies of ballot envelopes for every county before the general election without significant disruption,” Holmes adds.
Finally, Holmes flagged that the demands of maintaining the USPS lists required under the order would be virtually impossible. “Voter registration data does not remain static. Voters continually update their registrations, ineligible voters are removed from the rolls, and newly eligible voters are added,” he says. “Meeting the proposed reporting requirements would require the Office of the Secretary of State to dedicate staff to provide updated information to USPS while those same staff are already responsible for other essential list maintenance and election preparation activities.”
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