Supreme Court leaves Boston injunction in place and blocks Trump mail-ballot rule for the midterms

The Supreme Court on Monday night refused to let the Postal Service carry out parts of a new mail-in voting rule before the November midterms. In a brief, unsigned order the justices left standing a Boston injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani. The court said the government is "unlikely to succeed on the merits" and that the usual equitable factors for emergency relief do not favor a stay.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a one-paragraph concurrence. He said state and local election officials "do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before" the election. He left open the possibility that the Postal Service might have power to issue such a rule in a later case. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented. Alito wrote that the Postal Service "has broad authority to regulate the mail" and likely has the power to enforce the restrictions.

The rule would have forced states that use the Postal Service to change how they print, track and accept mail ballots. A federal judge in Boston found those requirements are likely illegal because the Postal Service has no authority to impose them on state election systems. Voting by mail has already started in Alabama, North Carolina and Wisconsin. Other states are preparing to drop ballots into the same stream this month.

Mail ballots accounted for nearly a third of votes in recent federal elections. The processes now in use have been in place for years. The administration asked the justices to clear the restrictions with early voting already underway. The majority declined to do that work on the emergency docket and did not write a full opinion on the underlying statute.

President Trump called the result a "big loss for republicans" in a social media post. He has long opposed mail voting and has blamed it for his 2020 defeat, a claim that election officials and court records have not supported. He has also used mail ballots himself, including this year. The court's order does not decide the legality of the plan for future cycles. It decides that this plan will not govern November.

That distinction matters for clerks. Officials in more than a dozen states have already printed envelopes, bought scanners and trained staff on existing deadlines. A mid-September change would have forced reprints and new instructions after some voters had already requested ballots. Kavanaugh's concurrence treated that calendar as independently fatal even if the Postal Service later wins on power.

A separate fight over late-arriving ballots was decided in June. In that 5-4 case, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the three liberal justices, held that states may count postal ballots received after Election Day if they were postmarked by then. That opinion dealt with Mississippi's five-day grace period and with similar laws elsewhere. Monday's order is narrower. It is about a Postal Service rule, not about when a state may count a ballot that has already been cast.

Election officials spent Tuesday telling voters that the mail stream will work as it did in 2022 and 2024. Secretaries of state in both parties have an interest in that message. A sudden change in USPS handling so close to a midterm would have produced rejected ballots and litigation in December. The Boston injunction, now backed by the high court for this cycle, keeps the existing handling rules in place.

Alito's dissent will be cited if the administration returns after November. He framed the dispute as one of postal power, not election policy. Kavanaugh's concurrence gives the government a path that is slower: win on authority in a full case, then give clerks months to adapt. For this autumn those paths are closed. Ballots already in transit will be processed under the old rules. States that planned to mail packets in the coming weeks can keep those plans.

The practical result is simple. A voter who puts a completed ballot in a blue box this week will have it carried under the same USPS procedures that applied last cycle. The administration can still argue the merits in the First Circuit and, later, in a petition for review. It cannot use the emergency docket to rewrite the mail stream with two months left before Election Day.