On Monday, July 27, 2026 — 99 days before the midterm elections — the Trump administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court to let it start enforcing an executive order that would put sweeping new federal restrictions on voting by mail.

Two courts had already said no. This was the administration going over their heads, with the clock running.

What the order would actually do

Trump signed the order on March 31. Here's what it requires, according to reporting from States Newsroom:

• States would have to tell the U.S. Postal Service, 90 days before an election, whether they plan to use mail-in ballots at all.
• States would have to hand the federal government a list of their eligible voters at least two months before the election — and before mailing anyone a ballot.
• The Department of Homeland Security, with help from the Social Security Administration, would build lists of voting-age citizens in every state from naturalization and Social Security records, plus a DHS database called SAVE, and send those lists to state officials.

Read that last one again. It means the federal government assembling a national roster of who it thinks is allowed to vote, and handing it to the states.

The district judge, Indira Talwani, found the order didn't cite any constitutional or legal authority that would let the president create those lists in the first place.

Why courts keep blocking it

The reason isn't complicated, and it isn't partisan. The Constitution gives states, not the president, the authority to run elections.

A three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the order "directs unprecedented levels of involvement by federal officials in how states administer elections." Judges Gustavo A. Gelpí and Julie Rikelman wrote that on Saturday, denying the administration's request to let the order take effect.

The administration's main argument was essentially not yet — that states can't complain because the Postal Service hasn't finished writing the rule. The judges rejected it. The order requires states to start submitting citizenship rosters 60 days before the general election — September 4 this year. States have been preparing for November for months. Making them build a whole new election system in a few weeks is not a hypothetical burden.

"The Government has failed to convince us that the impact of the (executive order) on the Plaintiff States is 'hypothetical,'" the judges wrote.

Even the panel's third judge, Joshua D. Dunlap, who partly disagreed, noted the order's timeline would have forced states into immediate action on mail ballots.

Twenty-three states sued. Twelve Republican AGs sided with Trump.

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

Backing the order in court: Republican attorneys general in 12 states — Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas.

That's the part worth sitting with. Twelve states' top lawyers went to court to argue for a federal takeover of how their own states run elections. Republicans have spent decades saying elections should be run locally, close to the voters, free of Washington interference. Given a live case about exactly that, twelve of them filed on Washington's side.

Vote-by-mail used to be bipartisan

Nearly every state allows voting by mail. Several run their elections entirely that way. It's especially common in Western states — including deep-red ones — because it's practical when people live far from a polling place.

And it used to be uncontroversial. In 2018, the Pew Research Center found 71% of voters supported vote-by-mail, including 57% of Republicans.

Then Trump spent the 2020 cycle attacking it. By an April 2026 poll, Republican support had cratered to 34%.

Nothing about the practice changed. The rhetoric did.

In the executive order itself, Trump claimed restricting mail voting would limit voting by noncitizens — a problem he has raised for years without producing evidence that it has meaningfully affected any election.

What's actually at stake

Voting by mail is how a lot of Americans vote: people working two jobs, people without a car, people caring for a parent, rural voters an hour from the county seat, seniors who can't stand in line, service members overseas.

Making states certify their mail-ballot plans months in advance, hand over voter lists, and match them against a federal citizenship database isn't a small administrative tweak. It's a set of chokepoints — and every chokepoint is a place where an eligible voter can get flagged, dropped, or delayed.

The timing is its own message. Trump signed this order in March. His administration went to the Supreme Court in late July, with 99 days left, asking to impose a brand-new system on states in the middle of an election.

The bottom line

Two federal courts have now said the president can't take over how states run their elections. The administration is asking the Supreme Court to say otherwise, weeks before ballots go out.

If you want to know which politicians actually trust voters, watch who is fighting to make voting harder three months before an election — and who is defending the right of their own state to run its own elections.

Source

This post is based on reporting by Jacob Fischler for Florida Phoenix / States Newsroom. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images.