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A mailbox and a ballot drop box in Washington state.<\/span>M. Scott Brauer\/ZUMA<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n President Donald Trump\u2019s latest<\/span> effort to steal the midterms has played out in plain view. His plan was to force states to conform to last minute, untested, and too-late-to-implement vote-by-mail requirements with the inevitable result of disenfranchising thousands, if not millions, of voters. The only thing Trump needed to launch this bomb into November\u2019s elections was the go-ahead from the Supreme Court.\u00a0<\/p>\n But on Monday evening, the court refused<\/a> to okay the scheme.\u00a0The brief, unsigned order stated that the Trump administration was unlikely to prevail in its argument that its US Postal Service rule limiting ballot delivery was legal, and that the harm of letting the rule take effect was too great.<\/p>\n As with so many of Trump\u2019s corrupt and lawless actions\u2014from his crypto<\/a> schemes<\/a> to bulldozing<\/a> the East Wing of the White House\u2014the president often carries out corrupt and illegal schemes in public. His plan to disrupt mail-in voting, which he perceives would harm Democrats more than Republicans, was the latest. By sanitizing the effort with the language of executive orders, rule-making, and court documents, the administration hoped to blind people to the election-stealing scheme underneath it all. It was an attempted heist in broad daylight.<\/p>\n In addition to the scheme\u2019s illegality, officials said it would be impossible to implement in six weeks.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n On Monday, only two justices publicly went along with this plan. In a dissent, Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, argued that the government likely had the authority to regulate mail-in ballots in the way the administration tried. A third justice, Brett Kavanaugh, agreed, but said implementing it so close to the election would cause too much harm. That means there are likely three votes, if not more, that would side with a Trump administration push to implement its mail-in ballot rules for the 2028 elections and beyond.<\/p>\n Trump has been <\/span>set on winning this fall\u2019s midterms by any means for more than a year. Shortly after returning to power in 2025, he issued<\/a> an executive order requiring citizens to show a passport or similar document to prove citizenship when registering to vote. But the president has no authority to interfere with states\u2019 administration of elections, and a federal court blocked the order. Next, he pressed<\/a> Congress to pass the SAVE Act<\/a>, which would have similarly required documentary proof of citizenship. When that failed, he issued the March 2026 executive order<\/a> that led to today\u2019s court action, this time instructing the Postal Service to limit the delivery of mail-in-ballots by promulgating a rule that places new requirements on how states can send mail ballots. The rule, formally unveiled in late August, would have allowed the Postal Service to throw out thousands, even millions, of ballots that are legally cast. It\u2019s an illegal power grab that states, election officials, and legal experts warned would cause a preventable and monumental disaster.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe rule threatens to disenfranchise millions of elderly voters, disabled voters, military voters, and all others including the most vulnerable who depend on mail voting, in both red states and blue,\u201d four experts wrote in an amicus brief<\/a> to the Supreme Court. \u201cThis disenfranchisement risk is literal, not hyperbolic.\u201d<\/p>\n The Trump administration even acknowledged the fallout. In asking<\/a> the justices to allow the USPS rule to take effect, the administration downplayed it <\/strong>as merely imposing \u201cmodest envelope-design and addressee-information requirements.\u201d But a few pages later, the brief argued that failing to swiftly implement the rule\u2014an impossible feat so close to the midterms\u2014would have disastrous results. Unless the rule takes effect immediately, \u201cthere is a grave risk that States may not have taken the necessary steps to comply\u2026potentially depriving those States\u2019 citizens of the ability to vote by mail.\u201d In other words, even the administration knew that rushing out the rule would lead to mass disenfranchisement\u2014it simply wouldn\u2019t accept that that was a good reason to block implementation of its \u201cmodest\u201d envelope requirements.<\/p>\n Though it help against Trump this time, the Supreme Court let the order get this far. On August 24, the court threw the midterms into turmoil by ruling<\/a> that it was too soon for states to challenge the executive order because it wasn\u2019t yet affecting the states. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson denounced that ruling as a \u201cKafkaesque nightmare\u201d that \u201ccontributes to pre-election chaos instead of quashing it.\u201d The Postal Service had unveiled its rule<\/a> on August 21, which specified that it will only deliver mail-in ballots if states both hand over their voter rolls<\/a> to the Trump administration via <\/strong>an online portal that the Postal Service has yet to complete, and adopt new envelope and bar code requirements.<\/p>\n In addition to the Postal Service rule, Trump\u2019s executive order instructs the Department of Homeland Security to create a nationwide database and individual lists of citizens in each state, presumably to limit who can vote. <\/strong>Such a system might be used to override state voter rolls with potentially inaccurate<\/a> lists. That portion of the order was put on hold<\/a> in a different legal challenge, but the administration has appealed<\/a> to the Supreme Court, which will soon seperately <\/em>decide whether DHS can use it. <\/strong>This means that the threat of administration meddling in the midterms through this executive order has not disappeared.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s executive order is <\/span>a massive power grab that aimed to usurp states\u2019 authority to run their own elections and radically transform the role of the Postal Service from delivering the mail to determining who receives a ballot according to Trump\u2019s whims. \u201cNever before has USPS attempted to interfere with elections in this way, let alone a fast-approaching election,\u201d the 23 states challenging the rule told the court<\/a>. \u201cAnd nothing in federal law authorizes USPS to refuse to deliver ballots.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In addition to the scheme\u2019s obvious illegality, election officials have repeatedly told courts it would be impossible to implement six weeks before the midterms.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIn some States, unrebutted evidence establishes that compliance with USPS\u2019 rule would be impossible ahead of the midterms, meaning that millions of voters would be unable to vote by mail and some would not be able to vote at all,\u201d the 23 states challenging the rule wrote. \u201cIn the remaining States, there would be chaos\u2014and a significant risk that millions more voters would be denied the ability to vote.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n A Postal Service whistleblower<\/a> told Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) on August 31 that the new USPS system was \u201csecretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed\u201d and could lead to a \u201ccatastrophic failure which could derail the midterm elections.\u201d As one example, the whistleblower said that if one ballot out of 10,000 failed to scan properly, all 10,000 ballots would be rejected. The whistleblower concluded that \u201cpotentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all.\u201d<\/p>\n Election officials across the country and from both parties amplified these concerns.<\/p>\n \u201cEven if state and local officials were somehow able to implement this new rule perfectly, there is a high risk of mistakes, incompetence, and delay on USPS\u2019 part,\u201d the 23 states opposed to the rule told the courts. \u201cOne statistic from USPS\u2019 final rule illustrates how little the agency has thought all of this through. USPS estimates that its ballot-scanning process could take up to one minute per ballot. If that is right, it would take USPS approximately 43 years to scan all of California\u2019s 23 million mail ballots, to say nothing of the time required to scan the millions of ballots mailed in other States.\u201d<\/p>\n The opposition to the USPS rule didn\u2019t just come from blue states. Top Republican election officials in Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Utah told the court<\/a> that \u201cneither election officials across the country nor USPS are equipped to successfully implement this Rule for the 2026 midterms.\u201d The election administrators\u2019 brief notes that mail-in ballots have already been sent<\/a> in states including North Carolina, Delaware, and Alabama, and will soon go out in many other places. \u201cAttempting to implement the Rule now will almost certainly lead to mistakes, delays, and confusion for both voters and election officials,\u201d they wrote.<\/p>\n District Judge Indira Talwani, a Barack Obama appointee, first blocked Trump\u2019s order in June in the 23 states that challenged it and extended that to a nationwide injunction in early August. \u201cThe Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,\u201d she wrote<\/a>. Following the Supreme Court\u2019s decision on August 24 to allow the executive order to move forward, she specifically blocked the new USPS rule<\/a> after a new challenge from states and voting rights groups, finding that states working \u201con a prescribed timeframe\u201d would be \u201cunable to pivot this late in the election cycle, nearly guaranteeing significant disenfranchisement.\u201d<\/p>\n A unanimous panel of judges on the First Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed<\/a> Talwani\u2019s decision last Thursday. \u201cWe see no obvious error in the district court\u2019s conclusion that allowing this Final Rule to be effective for the soon-arriving November 3 election will likely result in the disenfranchisement of millions of voters across the country while providing minimal\u2014if any\u2014gains in combating voter fraud,\u201d they wrote.<\/p>\n On Sunday night, a Trump-appointed district court judge, Carl Nichols of Washington, D.C., also issued an injunction against the USPS rule<\/a>. While Judge Talwani had only enjoined key parts of the USPS rule, Judge Nichols blocked the entire rule<\/a>, writing that it exceeded \u201cany conception of the outer bounds\u201d of the agency\u2019s authority.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s proposed system<\/span> appeared designed to fail\u2014which is exactly what the president wanted. One in 3 Democrats voted by mail<\/a> in 2024, compared to 1 in 4 Republicans, according to data published by The New York Times.<\/em> Trump was willing to disenfranchise a significant chunk of his own voters so long as more Democrats pay the price.<\/p>\n This Supreme Court has allowed many of Trump\u2019s illegal actions to proceed, from deporting people without due process to building his ill-gotten ballroom. Massive chaos and disenfranchisement in the midterms, with the court\u2019s imprimatur, proved beyond the pale. But the court has done the president and his party many favors this election cycle.<\/p>\n After all, the six conservative justices have already green-lit a key part of Trump\u2019s effort to tilt the midterms in the GOP\u2019s favor by destroying the Voting Rights Act<\/a> and approving the unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering<\/a> that has allowed Republicans to draw 10 more GOP-friendly seats<\/a> in the race for the House of Representatives. They\u2019ve repeatedly overruled their own so-called precedents and allowed states like Louisiana<\/a> and Alabama<\/a> to cancel primaries and suspend elections in order to give Republicans as many extra seats in the midterms as possible.<\/p>\n Just last week, they intervened on the shadow docket to further boost the GOP\u2019s fortunes by holding that political party committees, where Republicans hold a huge financial advantage over Democrats, should get the same discounted TV ad rates<\/a> as candidates.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s Postal Service ruse will not take effect for the midterms. But the administration is likely to turn to other tactics, and the Supreme Court could be drawn into the fray. Trump may try to interfere in the midterms<\/a> through actions like sending ICE to the polls<\/a>, seizing ballots, or declaring a fake national emergency<\/a>. After all, this is the same president who launched a violent insurrection to overturn an election. The president has long acted like he was above the law and dared the courts to stop him. He\u2019ll almost certainly try it again.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n