Justice Department asks the Supreme Court again to revive Trump's mail-ballot order

The Trump administration on Sunday filed another emergency appeal at the Supreme Court after U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani extended an order that stops the Postal Service from enforcing President Donald Trump's executive restrictions on mail ballots for the November midterms. Solicitor General John Sauer told the justices that ballots have already begun to go out in North Carolina. Alabama is due to mail on 9 September. At least five more states start the week of 13 September. The longer the injunction sits, he argued, the less room remains to change the rules.

It is the third time the administration has asked the Court to step in on this order. The justices have allowed parts of the plan to proceed at earlier stages without deciding whether the underlying executive action is legal. That leaves the midterms in a split system: some federal pressure on how ballots move, and a district-court block on the Postal Service's role in carrying the president's instructions.

The fight sits on top of a 5-4 decision the Court issued on 29 June in a Mississippi case. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the three liberal justices to hold that federal law does not stop a state from counting a mail ballot that is postmarked by Election Day and arrives a few days later. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh dissented. About 30 states, by some counts, use some form of grace period. Votebeat put the number of states plus the District of Columbia with a formal window at 14. Either way, the June ruling was a loss for the White House and the Republican National Committee, which had asked the Court to strike the Mississippi five-day rule.

Trump called that decision a "tremendous loss" and said it showed the need for Congress to pass his SAVE America Act. He has argued, without producing evidence accepted by the Court, that delayed counts open the door to fraud. Last year he signed an order that sought to withhold federal funds from states that count ballots arriving after Election Day. The new Postal Service instructions are a second tool aimed at the same practice.

Talwani's extension is the immediate obstacle. A district judge cannot rewrite June's holding. She can still police how a federal agency carries out a presidential order that has not been fully tested. Sauer's Sunday brief treats time as the emergency: once a state has printed and shipped a ballot under current rules, a late Supreme Court stay does less work.

Control of Congress is on the ballot in November. Mail ballots are a larger share of the vote in some of the states that will decide the House. The Court has already said a postmark-by-Election-Day rule can stand. The administration is now asking the same nine justices to let an executive order squeeze the Postal Service from the other direction. Whether they take the case before Alabama's 9 September drop is the next date that matters.