Supreme Court blocks USPS rule that would have held back mail ballots

The US Supreme Court on 14 September refused to lift a Boston injunction that stops the Postal Service from enforcing new mail-ballot rules before the 3 November midterms. The unsigned order said the government was unlikely to succeed on the merits. It did not publish a vote count. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a one-paragraph concurrence. Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, dissented and wrote that the administration was likely to prevail on appeal.

The fight started with a March executive order and a Postal Service rule that followed it. States would have had to send lists of voters approved to receive mail ballots to a new central portal. The Postal Service would deliver ballots only to names on those lists. States would also have had to use agency-approved outbound and return envelopes with a unique barcode for each voter. Ballots that failed the match, or arrived in a batch with a bad barcode, could be held back. The rule also told the Justice Department to prioritise prosecutions of officials who sent or received ballots for people the federal government judged ineligible.

Why election offices said the timing mattered

North Carolina and Alabama had already begun mailing thousands of ballots when the justices ruled. Other states were days away from doing the same. Redesigning envelopes, reprinting stock and rebuilding mail files this close to Election Day was, in the view of the states that sued, either extremely hard or impossible. A Postal Service whistleblower's account, reported while the emergency application was pending, said a single barcode problem could stop an entire tray, not just one envelope.

US District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston had blocked the rule while challenges by states and voting-rights groups proceeded. The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to stay that injunction. The court said no for this cycle. Kavanaugh, writing only for himself, said there was at least a fair prospect that some of the postal standards sit inside federal statutes, but that forcing them onto states now would be arbitrary and capricious because local officials would not have enough time to put them in place.

What this order does not decide

The September order is an emergency ruling, not a full opinion on whether Congress or the Postal Service may ever standardise ballot envelopes. It leaves the underlying cases alive. It also sits beside a separate June decision, Watson v. Republican National Committee, in which the court voted 5-4 to let Mississippi count mail ballots postmarked by Election Day and received up to five days later. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that federal election-day statutes set the day a voter must cast a ballot, not the day a clerk must physically hold it. About 30 states use some form of grace period.

President Trump has argued that mail voting is open to fraud. The administration presented the USPS rule as a logistics measure. Democratic-led states and voting groups called it an attempt to put the post office, which the Constitution does not charge with writing election law, between state clerks and voters. The court did not referee that political argument in detail. It said the government had not shown it was likely to win and had not shown a stronger case for putting the rule back in force immediately.

For clerks the operational result is plain. Lists do not have to go to a federal portal this autumn. Barcodes of the Postal Service's design are not mandatory this autumn. Prosecution guidance in the order does not rewrite state codes. Republicans are defending a narrow congressional majority on 3 November. Mail ballots will move under the rules that existed before the March order, unless a later judgment says otherwise after the votes are in.