Supreme Court leaves Postal Service mail-ballot rules blocked for the midterms

The US Supreme Court on 14 September refused to lift a lower-court block on new Postal Service rules for mail-in ballots. The unsigned emergency order said the government was unlikely to succeed on the merits and that the usual factors did not favour undoing the injunction before the midterm elections. The court did not publish a vote count. That is normal on the emergency docket.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh filed a one-paragraph concurrence. He wrote that there was at least a fair prospect the Postal Service had statutory power to set the rules, but that forcing states and local clerks to apply them this close to November would be arbitrary and capricious. State and local officials, he said, do not have enough time to put the changes in place in a reasonable way.

Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, dissented in eight pages. Alito would have let the rules run for this cycle. He called the challenge a Hail Mary and said he thought the administration would win later because the Postal Service has broad authority over the mail. The majority did not accept that timetable. The practical effect is that the 2026 midterms will be run under the old postal practice, not under the new screen the administration wanted.

The fight is separate from the court’s 29 June ruling in the Mississippi grace-period case. In that 5-4 decision, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the three liberal justices, the court held that federal election-day statutes do not require every absentee ballot to be in a clerk’s hands on election day. About 30 states count at least some ballots that are postmarked by election day and arrive later. Mississippi allows a five-day window. Trump called that decision a tremendous loss and used it to push the SAVE America Act. The September order deals with a different instrument: an attempt to make the Postal Service itself police new delivery conditions in the weeks before the vote.

President Trump has argued for years that mail ballots invite fraud. He has not produced evidence that matches the scale of that claim. The administration’s latest plan, as described by the courts, risked leaving millions of ballots undelivered or untreated in time if clerks and postal plants could not retool. That risk, not a ruling on the final legality of the policy, is what kept the injunction in place.

Early voting is already under way in some states. County clerks print envelopes, set drop-box rules and train seasonal staff on fixed calendars. A mid-September change to how the Postal Service handles political mail would have landed inside that calendar. Kavanaugh’s concurrence is the clearest statement of why even a justice open to the government’s legal theory still voted to wait.

The underlying case is not over. The majority said only that the government is unlikely to win this round. Alito thinks it will win the next one. If the administration keeps the rule on the books, the same dispute can return after November, when clerks are not in the middle of a count. For this election the line is set: late-arriving ballots that meet state postmark rules will still be processed, and the Postal Service will not apply the blocked screen.

What remains is the political use of the fight. A weeks-long argument over envelopes can confuse voters even when the legal outcome is a stay. That confusion is now part of the midterm record, alongside the June grace-period ruling and the still-unpassed SAVE America Act.