The Supreme Court allowed a lower court’s decision to stop implementation of the Postal Service’s mail ballot rule for this November’s elections to remain in place, in a one-paragraph decision released on Monday night. Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted in a paragraph concurring with the majority that his concerns about the infeasibility of implementation at this late stage took precedence over his view of the merits of the rule, while Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.
The decision ended a few weeks’ worth of hot potato among states that sued to block the rule, the Trump administration, a federal district court in Massachusetts that issued the key rulings, and the Supreme Court itself, which invalidated the first round of litigation on grounds that it addressed the executive order from which the Postal Service’s rule was eventually to come — not the rule itself. Those technicalities have not made the developments easy to track and explain.
But the high court’s Monday decision was simple enough: The Trump administration’s request for the justices to overrule the Massachusetts court’s order, which stated that “[f]or elections occurring before or on November 3, 2026, USPS Defendants may not implement in any way and may not take any further preparatory steps to implement” the key sections of the agency’s rule, was denied.
The practical effect is that mail voting will continue to proceed this year according to the laws in the 50 states at the outset of the election. The states will manage their mail voting lists and mail ballot logistics as usual, without new oversight from and processes mandated by the federal government.
Disagreements among Kavanaugh and the combination of Alito and Thomas are of note, on the question of the timing of the rule for this year. The former was persuaded that “state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections.” The latter two, as law professor Derek Muller observed, instead relied on the word of 12 attorneys general at an earlier point on the timeline of legal proceedings that “compliance at this time is practicable.”
A large group of local and state election officials, including seven Republican chief election officials of their respective states, made themselves part of that debate in a brief filed to the court last week. They “suggest[ed] only” that the 2026 general election be conducted under the mail voting rules that were in place at the start of it, based on a detailed list of reasons they provided as to why the USPS rule was, in the short term, effectively impossible to adhere to.
“That result can, and in [our] view should, be reached without deciding anything about the merits of the Rule,” they wrote. And so it went.
“As expected, the United States Supreme Court has upheld the injunction blocking the USPS mail ballot rule,” Utah lieutenant governor Deidre Henderson, one of the seven Republican chief election officials, responded on Monday night. “Utahns can have confidence that the 2026 election will proceed as normal.” Utah is the only “red state” among eight total that conducts its elections mostly or all by mail; a poll from the local Deseret News in October 2024 found that 72 percent of registered Republicans there were somewhat or very confident that their mail ballots are counted as intended.
President Trump reacted on Tuesday morning, accusing the majority of a “horrible, highly political, ruling,” adding that “[t]hese are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court,” in reference to Justices Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch, each of whom was nominated by Trump and among the seven justices who preserved the lower court’s order.
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