Rejected

The Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s bid to impose new restrictions on mail-in voting ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, a decisive ruling handed down Monday that allows states to continue running their existing vote-by-mail systems even as ballots are already being cast in some jurisdictions. The ruling marks the definitive resolution of a legal fight that had been winding through federal courts since spring, when President Trump signed an executive order directing the U.S. Postal Service to play a central role in verifying mail-ballot eligibility. The administration framed the mail-voting restrictions as an election-integrity safeguard, but the justices found the plan “unlikely to succeed on the merits,” a phrase that effectively ended the administration’s chances of implementing the order before November’s midterm elections. Notably, the coalition that rejected the mail-in voting restrictions was not drawn along the predictable ideological lines that typically define high-profile Supreme Court election cases. Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh — all three appointed by Trump himself during his first term — joined the majority in ruling against the administration’s position, while Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas publicly dissented. That alignment complicates any straightforward narrative about the court simply protecting a Republican president’s agenda, underscoring instead a genuine split among the court’s conservative wing over the limits of executive authority in setting election procedure. The mail ballot restrictions case traces back to Trump’s original executive order, which sought to have USPS compile and rely on eligibility lists supplied by state election officials before delivering mail ballots to voters. A federal judge had already found that the Postal Service, as an independent federal agency, lacks the legal authority to condition ballot delivery on the kind of citizenship and eligibility verification scheme the order envisioned — a finding the Supreme Court’s Monday ruling effectively left intact by declining to revive the administration’s approach in time for this election cycle. Data on the scale of mail voting in the United States helps explain why Monday’s ruling carries such high stakes for how the 2026 midterms will actually be conducted. Roughly one-third of American voters now cast their ballots by mail rather than in person, and eight states — California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Washington — conduct their elections almost entirely through mail-in voting, meaning any successful restriction would have reshaped how a substantial share of the electorate participates in this fall’s elections. The administration had defended the push for tighter verification by citing concerns about noncitizen voting, though independent research, including a 2025 Brookings Institution analysis, has found that instances of noncitizen voting occur at a rate of approximately 0.000043% of all ballots cast — a figure voting rights advocates have repeatedly cited as evidence that the restrictions targeted a problem far smaller in practice than in political rhetoric. Reaction from state election officials, who have spent months preparing for the possibility that mail-voting rules could shift dramatically and suddenly, was one of relief tempered by continued vigilance given how contentious the underlying legal fight has been. Oregon’s Secretary of State framed the ruling in stark terms, emphasizing that “presidents don’t run elections, the people do,” a line that captured the broader argument voting rights groups have made throughout the litigation: that election administration authority under the Constitution rests primarily with states and Congress, not the executive branch. Nevada’s Secretary of State described the mood among election officials as “one of relief,” while still urging voters to remain confident in the process regardless of the legal turbulence surrounding it in recent months. Monday’s ruling is the latest and most consequential chapter in a case that has moved through the courts in fits and starts since Trump signed the original order. An earlier Supreme Court order in August had paused a lower-court injunction specifically as it applied to roughly two dozen Democratic-led states, allowing partial implementation to proceed in a narrower set of circumstances while a separate, broader nationwide injunction remained in place. That fragmented earlier ruling had left election officials genuinely uncertain about which rules would apply where, a limbo that Monday’s more sweeping rejection appears to resolve in voters’ favor nationwide, at least for this election cycle. The timing of the decision — arriving as voting is already underway in some states with early and mail balloting — added urgency to the court’s ruling, since any further delay in resolving the legal uncertainty risked disrupting ballot printing, mailing schedules and voter confidence in the weeks immediately preceding the election. Legal analysts following the case say the practical effect of Monday’s ruling is to lock in the status quo for mail voting through the 2026 midterms, even though the broader constitutional questions about presidential authority over election administration remain technically unresolved and could resurface in future litigation well before the next presidential election cycle. Republican officials who had supported the push for tighter mail-ballot verification expressed disappointment but signaled the fight over election security is far from over, pointing to state-level efforts to tighten voter ID rules through legislative channels. Democratic officials and voting rights organizations characterized the ruling as a necessary check on executive overreach into an area the Constitution reserves primarily to states and Congress. The decision lands amid a broader wave of election-related legal battles playing out simultaneously across the country this election cycle, including ongoing redistricting fights in more than half a dozen states that have reshaped House maps ahead of November. Voting rights advocates argue that taken together, the mail-ballot litigation and the redistricting battles reflect a coordinated push to influence the midterm playing field through the courts and executive action alike, while administration officials continue to insist each initiative addresses a distinct and legitimate concern about fairness or integrity in how elections are run. With the mail-voting question now largely settled for this cycle, attention is likely to shift toward how those redistricting disputes and other pending election-law cases are resolved in the final stretch before voters head to the polls in November….