Trump-appointed judge blocks USPS mail-ballot rule as Supreme Court waits

Judge Carl J. Nichols of the U.S. District Court in Washington issued a preliminary injunction late on Sunday, 13 September, stopping the Postal Service from enforcing a mail-ballot regulation adopted in late August. The order is the second active freeze on President Donald Trump’s plan to change how absentee ballots move through the mail before the 3 November midterms. Nichols was appointed by Trump. In May he had refused to block an earlier version of the policy because he found the lawsuit premature. Once the Postal Service issued the operational rule, he changed course.

The regulation would have required states to send federal election ballots only in envelopes that met new design specifications and only to voters whom the Postal Service had checked through a “Federal Ballot Mail Portal.” In practice the portal would have given a federal agency a gate on which names received a ballot. Nichols wrote that key pieces of the rule “exceed any conception of the outer bounds” of Postal Service authority under the Postal Reorganization Act. That statute, he said, does not let the agency impose election procedures on state officials, build a voter data system, or refuse to carry otherwise lawful mail.

He also weighed the evidence the administration offered on fraud. The government, he wrote, pointed to no record showing there would be “significant fraud in the upcoming elections” if the rule stayed on ice. The other side of the scale was concrete. Plaintiffs, including Common Cause and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in related filings, showed that if the rule took effect a “significant number of otherwise appropriate absentee or mail-in ballots” would risk going uncounted. Early voting has already started in several states. Nichols said the short gap between the late-August rule and Election Day “cuts strongly in favor” of an injunction.

Judge Indira Talwani in Boston had already frozen the same scheme in a separate case. An appeals panel left her stay in place. The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to lift that order and, on Monday, formally told the justices about Nichols’s ruling. Administration lawyers argued that if the Court blesses the Postal Service plan, Nichols would have to dissolve his injunction. The justices have not acted. With fifty days to the midterms, even a fast emergency docket would leave election officials little time to reprint envelopes, rebuild mailing files, or train clerks on a federal portal.

Trump has long blamed mail ballots for his 2020 defeat and has described them as a fraud risk. States that expanded mail voting during the pandemic kept large shares of it. Election administrators told both courts they could not implement the new envelope and portal rules before November without dropping lawful ballots. Nichols accepted that operational claim. He did not decide the final merits. A preliminary injunction only holds the line while the case, captioned in one of the live dockets as DSCC v. Trump, 26-cv-1114, proceeds.

The legal fight now sits at the junction of two older arguments. One is about who runs elections. The Constitution assigns the “times, places and manner” of congressional elections to state legislatures, subject to congressional override. It does not assign that role to the Postal Service. The other is about the president’s power to direct an independent establishment. Nichols did not need to write a grand theory of either point. He needed only to find that plaintiffs were likely to win and that the public interest favored counting ballots that already meet state law.

What happens next is mechanical. The administration will appeal. The Supreme Court may take the Boston case, the Washington case, or both. If the justices stay silent into October, county clerks will keep mailing under the rules they already know. If the Court lifts the injunctions, states that have already sent ballots will face a split system: some envelopes will meet the new design, some will not, and the portal will not have a clean list. Nichols’s opinion is useful to the challengers because it comes from a judge the president chose. It is useful to the administration only if the Supreme Court treats it as one more district-court error to brush aside. Until then the Postal Service may not run the portal or reject ballots on the August design rules.