Ballots start going out to voters in a few weeks. This week, the rules for how they get printed, addressed, and mailed were thrown open again.

On Monday, August 24, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the pause on President Trump's executive order rewriting how the Postal Service handles mail-in ballots. Two separate injunctions had frozen it. The Court lifted one of them — the June order in the 23 states' case — and said nothing at all about the other.

That is the headline. The part underneath it is worse.

The Postal Service published the rule while a judge's order said it couldn't

On August 11, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani issued a preliminary injunction barring the federal government from changing states' mail-in voting rules before the November 3 midterms.

On August 21 — ten days later — the Postal Service issued its final rule doing exactly that. A 95-page notice set out federal requirements for states to redesign ballot envelopes and hand over lists of the names and addresses of people getting mail ballots. The rule took effect that Friday, with publication in the Federal Register set for August 26.

The government did not appeal Talwani's order first. It did not ask anyone to pause it. Talwani said so herself, in a brief order on the docket that Sunday:

"Defendants did not file an appeal and did not seek, let alone obtain, a stay of the preliminary injunction. Nonetheless, on August 21, 2026, USPS issued its Final Rule, with an anticipated publication date in the Federal Register of August 26, 2026."

Talwani was appointed to the bench in 2013 and confirmed by the Senate unanimously.

The administration's answer was that the rule wouldn't really do anything while the injunction stood — the rule contains a provision saying it won't apply to this year's elections if her order is still in place. The judge wasn't persuaded. She wrote that the government asserted the rule would "have no effect on the rules themselves while the injunctions are in place, while ignoring the confusion that the publication will engender."

Then, on Monday, the Supreme Court took up a different order in the same fight, and made its future somebody else's problem.

What the Court actually said

The ruling came on the emergency docket — unsigned, from the conservative majority, with no full argument. The majority wrote that the administration is likely to win its argument that the 23 Democratic-led states challenging the order do not have standing to sue over it, and that the lower court's injunction is "causing irreparable harm."

The Court was careful not to bless the order itself:

"The Court's disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful. On that score, time will tell."

Time will tell. Ballots go out in weeks.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. Jackson wrote that the ruling "needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections," called the situation a "Kafkaesque nightmare," and said the principle that courts shouldn't rewrite voting rules right before an election had been eroded.

"States administering elections and the voting public that relies on them to do so deserve clarity, not caginess or confusion."

Whether Talwani's June injunction survives is now up to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Her August 11 injunction — the one the Postal Service issued its rule in the teeth of, and the one that reaches every state rather than only the 23 that sued — the Court did not address at all.

What the order does

Trump signed the executive order on March 31. It:

• directs the Postal Service to order mail-ballot envelopes redesigned, including adding a unique barcode;
• asks the Postal Service to collect voters' names and addresses from state election officials.

And it directs the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute state officials who don't comply.

That last piece is the one to sit with. Running elections is a state job. The order tells federal prosecutors to go after the state officials who do it their own way.

We wrote up the earlier stages of this fight when a federal judge first blocked the order in June — that ruling found the Postal Service has no authorization from Congress to write binding rules about mail-in voting, and that the Constitution "reserves the power to determine voter eligibility to the States alone." And we covered the moment the administration took it to the Supreme Court in late July, 99 days out from the election. Monday is the answer to that filing.

The Solicitor General calls it modest

Solicitor General D. John Sauer — who previously worked as Trump's personal defense attorney — filed a supplemental brief to the justices on Monday arguing the Postal Service's rule "underscores the need for relief from the district court's improper, unripe injunction."

His description of the rule:

"The Postal Service's final rule imposes only modest requirements for preparation and envelope design for federal ballot mail — requirements that fall well within its traditional authorities to impose mailing standards for particularly sensitive types of mail."

A demand that every state redesign its ballot envelopes and turn over a list of its mail voters, ten weeks before an election, is not a mailing standard.

Who is on which side

Democratic officials in 23 states — California, Massachusetts, Nevada, Washington, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — plus the District of Columbia brought the challenge.

Twelve states with Republican attorneys general joined the appeal on the federal government's side: Alabama, Missouri, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas.

Twelve states' top lawyers went to court to argue for federal control over how their own states run elections.

Meanwhile the voting rights groups who brought the separate Massachusetts case — led by the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts — filed an emergency motion that Saturday asking Talwani to enforce her own injunction quickly. Their filing noted there were "only 73 days before the November 2026 election, and far fewer before mail ballots begin to go out."

Why this matters to you

Trump has claimed since losing in 2020 that voting by mail is riddled with fraud. It isn't. But the claim is the engine for all of this, and the practical effect of the order is the same whether or not anyone believes the claim:

• If your state can't get its envelopes redesigned in time, your ballot's status is unclear.
• If your state won't hand over the list of people getting mail ballots, its ballots are the ones at risk.
• If your state's election officials decide the order is unconstitutional and act accordingly, the order tells the Justice Department to come after them.

None of that requires a single fraudulent ballot to exist.

What the record shows

On August 11 a federal judge barred the government from changing states' mail-voting rules before the November 3 election. On August 21 the Postal Service published the rule anyway, without appealing the order or asking for it to be paused. On August 24 the Supreme Court's conservative majority lifted one of the two injunctions against Trump's executive order, over three dissents, while explicitly declining to say the order is lawful — and left the second, which covers every state, untouched. Twelve Republican attorneys general argued for it. Voters get their ballots in a few weeks.

Source

U.S. Supreme Court lifts pause on Trump mail-ballot order — Ashley Murray, States Newsroom D.C. Bureau, August 25, 2026. Photo by Allison Joyce/Getty Images.

Supreme Court lifts 1 of 2 blocks on Trump’s mail-voting executive order — Dion Nissenbaum and Carrie Levine, Votebeat, August 24, 2026.