Supreme Court backs Trump’s order to curb mail ballots

By John Fritze, Tierney Sneed, CNN

(CNN) — The Supreme Court on Monday said that President Donald Trump could begin carrying out parts of an executive order intended to restrict mail voting, but additional legal challenges could hinder implementation of his plan before the November midterm election.

The ruling injects new uncertainty about the voting rules for the midterms by keeping alive the possibility that Trump will impose policies outlined in the March order that gave the US Postal Service and the Department of Homeland Security unprecedented roles in the running of elections.

The high court’s ruling, handed down in an unsigned order over the dissent of the court’s three liberal justices, means that the Trump administration may move forward with a proposal for DHS to compile state-specific lists of people it believes are eligible to vote in the Democratic-led states that had challenged the plan in court.

Another part of Trump’s executive order instructs the Postal Service to impose new mandates on states that want to send ballots through the mail, requiring that they submit their own lists of eligible voters to the agency and include information on ballot envelopes to allow those ballots to be tracked. The justices gave USPS the green light to implement that aspect of Trump’s plan, but a lower court blocked that effort nationwide in a separate case.

That means more court action will likely be needed before the USPS can move forward. And that court action could result in new emergency appeals to reach the Supreme Court quickly, potentially in a matter of days.

“If the Postal Service’s final rule harms the states, they may challenge that rule,” the court said in its order.

The Supreme Court’s decision did not address the legality of Trump’s executive order, only the timing of the challenge to it. Trump for years has made baseless claims about widespread voter fraud while specifically attempting to undermine confidence in mail voting.

“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 court wrote. “On that score, time will tell.”

Still, the order Monday represents a loss for the Democratic states, who warned they will need to immediately begin diverting time and resources away from preparing for this year’s elections, which are less than three months away.

“The ruling is a win for Trump for the moment, but it doesn’t fully clear the way for his effort to limit mail-in ballots to go into effect,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at Georgetown University Law Center. “As soon as tomorrow, a Massachusetts district court may block the underlying USPS rule at issue — which is the real thing to watch heading into November.”

Election cases have become particularly contentious this year at the Supreme Court, drawing sharp writing from members of both the conservative and liberal wings. In the highest profile case, the court’s 6-3 conservative majority gutted the Voting Rights Act in a significant ruling in late April dealing with Louisiana’s congressional districts.

The liberal justices dissented from the decision. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, wrote that they believed lower courts had the authority to rule in favor of the Democratic states now, while stressing that the high court’s majority had not addressed the legality of Trump’s directives on the merits.

“Today’s decision does not address whether the President’s attempts to interfere with States’ administration of the November 2026 elections are lawful. Nor does it suggest that the Executive Branch has any constitutional or statutory authority to implement the President’s directives,” Sotomayor wrote. “Instead, today’s decision merely postpones adjudication of those challenges.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, meanwhile, penned her own lengthy dissent using stronger language to bash how the ruling “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.”

She described what she saw as an inconsistent approach by the conservative majority when it comes to the timing of challenges to election policies, describing the precedents as a “Kafkaesque nightmare.”

While in the past, the court has turned away challenges to election rules for coming too late as voting approached, she wrote that “today’s revelation is that such claims can also come too early—never mind that an election is looming and related harms are presently occurring.”

This story has been updated with additional details.

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