The Supreme Court blocked President Donald Trump’s effort to let the U.S. Postal Service restrict mail ballots in the midterm elections, but the justices have otherwise handed Republicans a series of election-related wins this year, including approval of GOP congressional maps in Louisiana, Texas and Alabama.
Who Gets to Control the Vote
The Sept. 14 ruling kept in place a block on a Postal Service policy that would have required states to provide voter lists so the agency could compare them with a Department of Homeland Security database and decide which mail ballots to deliver. The administration said the policy was meant to check for fraud before delivery. Lower-court judges blocked it in three cases, and the Supreme Court said in a brief order that the government was unlikely to succeed on the merits and that the equitable factors did not favor lifting the injunction.
Kristen Clarke, general counsel for the NAACP and a former assistant attorney general for civil rights, called the decision “a big victory for voters this midterm election season” and said, “The Supreme Court rightly rejected an effort that would have made it harder for millions of Americans to participate in our elections. Mail voting is safe, secure, and deeply rooted in our nation's history.”
Trump called the ruling “another bad decision” and said it would make the country a “laughing stock.” On social media, he said, “This Supreme Court is bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years.” He also said the justices’ decisions on mail ballots, tariffs and birthright citizenship were “not the people I interviewed to serve.”
The fight is bigger than one postal policy. In a separate pending case, Solicitor General John Sauer asked the Supreme Court on Sept. 8 to lift a court order blocking states that want to check their lists from using Social Security numbers to search the database. The administration has fought in dozens of cases to force states to provide voter lists, saying it wants to confirm the citizenship of voters by comparing names against the SAVE database. The Justice Department has lost 23 lower-court cases trying to force states to turn over the lists. Judges have criticized SAVE as unreliable for that purpose. The Constitution says states control the times, places and manner of holding elections for Congress.
Maps Drawn at the Top, Costs Paid Below
The court’s redistricting rulings have also favored Republicans. The justices approved Republican maps in Louisiana, Texas and Alabama. The decisions could add five GOP seats in Texas among a 38-seat delegation, one of the six seats in Louisiana and one of seven seats in Alabama.
The key ruling came in the Louisiana case, which basically allowed partisan map-drawing so long as the lines weren’t drawn for racial reasons. Because Democratic and Black districts largely overlap in the South, the decision was considered a setback for challenges to maps that dilute Black votes, since states could defend the maps as diluting Democratic votes.
Democratic efforts to redraw maps in Virginia and New York were blocked. In Virginia, where Democrats had hoped to pick up four seats, the state Supreme Court blocked a new map and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to intervene. In New York, where Democrats aimed to pick up one seat, a state court allowed a new map to avoid diluting the voting power of Black people and Latinos in New York City, but the Supreme Court kept the previous map for the 2026 election.
Two redistricting cases went against the administration’s position. In California, the justices allowed a new map that could hand Democrats five more seats in the 52-member House delegation. In Missouri, the high court twice blocked a new map that aimed to add a Republican seat. The state Supreme Court had ruled that the map must be approved by voters in a November referendum before it can take effect. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who handles emergency appeals from Missouri, rejected a request from state officials and the Republican Party to intervene. Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins argued the state constitution doesn’t allow ballot measures over redistricting. At his request, U.S. Chief District Judge Stephen Clark temporarily blocked Missouri from using the GOP map, but the justices also set that order aside without explanation.
What They Call Democracy
The court has also sided with Republicans in campaign finance cases. In one, the justices scrapped a 50-year-old rule that capped how much political parties could spend in coordination with candidates. Congress approved the rule in 1974 after Watergate, and the Supreme Court upheld it in 2001. Vice President JD Vance and Republican campaign arms of the Senate and House challenged it. Kavanaugh wrote for the 6-3 majority that the rule violated the First Amendment’s free-speech protections, saying both parties can now “participate more freely and compete more fully in the political process.” In another case, the court allowed the Federal Communications Commission policy to go into effect after the Republican Party challenged lower ad rates for campaign ads on radio and television.
The Mississippi mail-ballot case produced a different result. The Republican and Libertarian parties challenged a state law allowing ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if they arrive up to five days later, and the Justice Department joined them. The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that federal law had not blocked states from setting grace periods. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote, “The question today is not whether requiring ballots to be received by election day is a good or bad idea; the question is whether the idea has made its way into the United States Code.” In the June case, Barrett also wrote that “Election fraud and its appearance are serious issues. Like other such issues, however, they must be addressed through the democratic process.”
Trump has argued that mail ballots are easy targets for fraud, even as he votes by mail himself. One of his complaints is the “red mirage,” the pattern in which election-night results can favor Republicans before later-counted ballots shift the totals toward Democrats. Trump’s own campaign aides have told him the phenomenon is common and not necessarily a sign of fraud. About 30% of voters across the country cast ballots by mail, and people in the military, the elderly and disabled especially rely on them.
After the Sept. 14 ruling, Trump and his supporters are expected to focus on other parts of their broader campaign to assert federal control over elections in the less than 50 days before the elections. The article said Trump has moved aggressively to assert federal control over elections in his second term and that his supporters are expected to work on other election fronts after the court blocked his executive order restricting mail ballots. The machinery keeps grinding. The people at the bottom keep getting told it’s all for order.