Supreme Court temporarily allows Trump's mail-in voting order

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday temporarily allowed the Trump administration to maintain an order placing restrictions on mail-in voting. 

The administration's order, issued in March, would direct the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to curate lists with the names of all citizens at least 18 years old in each state who are eligible to vote. The order would require the U.S. Postal Service to check the lists before sending out mail-in ballots. 

"This internal directive does not regulate the States’ voter registration processes," justices on the high court wrote. "Nor does it impinge on the States’ authority ‘to create and enforce a legal code’ for elections.'"

A federal judge in Massachusetts issued an order on July 25 blocking the Trump administration from implementing the mail-in ballot restrictions nationwide. A group of 23 states and the District of Columbia sued to prevent the order from going into effect. Judge Indira Talwani allowed all 23 states to be exempt from the order. 

Solicitor General John Sauer argued that the lists have yet to be implemented in any state and the order should not be valid, since there was no harm incurred by the involved parties.

"The respondent States have not suffered any cognizable injury caused by the Executive Order, because the Order itself does not affect their election processes at all, and it is entirely speculative whether and how any agency implementation may do so," Sauer said. 

Lawyers for the states said the administration could not move forward with an order this close to Election Day in the 2026 midterms. 

"Requiring that plaintiffs wait to challenge the EO’s implementing actions would cause them significant hardship and, as a practical matter, threaten to insulate the EO’s unlawful directives from judicial review before the upcoming elections," the lawyer's wrote. 

Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor opposed the high court's decision to move forward with the mail-in ballot order. The three liberal justices said the majority's decision does not address fundamental issues in the case that must be decided. 

"The Government has admitted that the lists 'might be used solely to facilitate this sort of post-election law-enforcement activity,'" Sotomayor wrote. 

Further legal challenges to the president's order are expected over the coming weeks that would prevent it from being implemented. 

The Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C. Photo: Andrew MacDonald / Unsplash