The Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for President Donald Trump to move ahead with his executive order restricting mail-in voting, even as election officials said the clock may already have run out before November. The court did not say the order is legal. It only said it was too early for Democratic-run states to challenge it in June, when they persuaded a federal judge in Boston to freeze the order for November’s election.
That ruling kicks the fight back into motion on a brutally compressed timeline. Initial ballots are scheduled to go out to North Carolina’s overseas and military voters in just over a week, on Sept. 4. A second injunction blocking the U.S. Postal Service from changing its operations to comply with Trump’s directive remains in effect for now, but the administration filed a motion late Monday asking for that hold to be lifted. The Postal Service also posted new regulations that would take effect Tuesday if the legal path is fully cleared.
Who Pays for the Power Grab
The people at the bottom of the election machine are the ones staring at the wreckage first. Jesse Salinas, the registrar of Yolo County in California and president of that state’s association of election officers, said ballots in his state start going out in 11 days and his county has already printed its envelopes. “You look at the timeline, and it’s a bit chaotic,” Salinas said, adding that he doesn’t know precisely which envelope designs comply with the new rules. He dismissed the idea of a last-minute revision in procedures. “The capacity to do that, I just don’t see it,” he said.
Tammy Patrick, chief program officer at the Elections Center, an association of 2,500 election officers, said no state can comply with the rule and that no one she talked to has tried. “There isn’t a single state that does their elections in a way that this postal rule lays out,” Patrick said. “There has been this assumption that this is not going to happen because it could not happen the way it’s laid out, because no one does it this way.”
Cisco Aguilar, the Democratic Secretary of State in Nevada, where every registered voter gets a mail ballot, pointed to the post office’s own failures. He said the Postal Service had already misdelivered three dozen mail ballots from his state’s June primary. “They’re going to come in within seven days and build a massive database that has 100% accuracy?” Aguilar said. “It is impossible to implement this system in that time frame.”
What the Rule Demands
The new rule requires specific formatting for envelopes containing mail ballots, which could force some jurisdictions to completely revise theirs. It also makes states use an electronic system to identify to the Postal Service who is voting by mail. If states don’t comply, their mail ballots won’t get sent. That’s the machinery of control in plain sight: a federal directive, a postal bureaucracy, and local election offices left to absorb the fallout.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned in dissent that the decision “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.” David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said the majority “seemed to create complete chaos leading up to the midterm elections” and that it would be “impossible” for states to comply with the new rules at this late date.
Legal experts said the order is unlikely to be implemented. The Supreme Court’s unsigned order said it hasn’t determined whether the measure is constitutional, and every victory the administration has won so far has only been because it argued that it is premature to talk about constitutionality. Opponents are already weighing new lawsuits since the final rule was published Friday night, and more litigation is expected.
The Mail Vote Fight Isn’t Over
Trump has long sought to make voting by mail largely impossible, though he himself has repeatedly cast his ballots by mail. He falsely blamed his 2020 loss on mail voting and spun up conspiracy theories that he’s tried to prove while back in office. Judges blocked him from creating new voting restrictions by executive order last year, and he only issued his latest order after his bill to revamp voting procedures stalled in the Senate amid Democratic opposition.
The Election Assistance Commission found that 29% of voters in 2024 cast their ballots through the mail. Democrats are more likely to use mail voting than Republicans, a reflection of how the process has become polarized since Trump began attacking it in 2020.
Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor, said after the ruling, “This doesn’t necessarily mean anything in terms of November.” Derek Muller, a Notre Dame law professor, said the Supreme Court still ensured a fraught court battle in the coming days. “It puts courts in a terrible place, because whatever happens is super close to the election,” Muller said. “If it permits it, it creates super disruption for the states. If it suspends it, it visibly angers the administration.”
Hasen said it’s inconceivable that the regulation will impact voters in November. “Both legal and practical reasons make this practically impossible to enforce,” he said. Elections are run by local officials in thousands of scattered offices, many of which don’t even have a full-time employee. Patrick said election officials feel like “punching bags” because they plan one way of conducting their elections and have contingency plans for fires or power outages, but not for something that affects one-third, one half, or all of their voters. That’s the real shape of the system here: orders from above, chaos below, and the people who actually keep elections running left to absorb the blow.