Judge makes permanent USPS mail-ballot block as DOJ appeals
A coalition of legal advocacy groups is escalating court challenges to President Donald Trump’s executive orders on voting, with the heaviest opposition aimed at two orders that would restrict mail voting and shift election authority away from the states. The opposition is led by the Democracy Defenders Fund, the Campaign Legal Center and the American Civil Liberties Union, joined by the Brennan Center for Justice, Democracy Forward, the Democratic Attorneys General Association and the Washington Litigation Group.
The groups say they have won key lawsuits on election issues, plus litigation that thwarted Trump’s moves to end birthright citizenship and to create a $1.8 billion fund that critics said could have paid money to allies, including people he deemed were unjustly charged in the January 6 Capitol attack.
Since Trump’s return to office, the Democracy Defenders Fund and the Campaign Legal Center have jointly filed lawsuits against Trump’s 2025 and 2026 executive orders on voting, challenging their constitutionality over new voting rules that by law are run by the states. In August the two groups filed a brief on behalf of several voting rights groups and local officials in two states seeking to block Trump’s March 2026 executive order, which would restrict voting by mail and authorize the U.S. Postal Service to implement rules to that end.
The most recent fight turned on the mail-voting rule. Last month, 24 Democratic attorneys general and other plaintiffs sued to block the Postal Service from moving forward with rules that would curb mail voting, and in late August won a temporary 14-day restraining order from U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Massachusetts. The Justice Department’s solicitor general, John Sauer, appealed to the Supreme Court on Thursday, arguing the freeze would create “serious, irreparable harm on the federal government, the states themselves, and the voting public.”
On Sept. 4, Talwani made the injunction permanent, writing that implementing Trump’s order so close to the election “threatens disenfranchisement of millions of United States citizens who seek to vote by mail.” She also wrote that “the record includes no evidence relating to fraudulent mail voting to support the rushed implementation.” Sauer responded on Sept. 6 with another emergency appeal to the high court, arguing that the rule “does not seize control of states’ administration of elections — it simply imposes reasonable preparation requirements for certain election-related mail.”
Separately, a whistleblower complaint released last week by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, alleged that the Postal Service is proceeding with a “secretive, rushed” effort to implement Trump’s order that could lead to “catastrophic failure” in this year’s mail-in voting. About 50 million Americans, a majority of them Democrats, vote by mail, according to reports.
Norm Eisen, executive chair of the Democracy Defenders Fund, which he co-founded in 2023, said the group has been involved in more than 300 legal cases and matters in three areas: elections, the rule of law and anti-corruption. Eisen said the fund likes to work in conjunction with groups like the Campaign Legal Center and the Washington Litigation Group “because they both have strong bipartisan credibility. It’s a big-tent approach we’ve taken with our election work.” He said the fund’s board, which includes conservative former federal judge J. Michael Luttig and liberal-leaning former federal judge Nancy Gertner, helped recruit dozens of former judges with bipartisan credentials to file amicus briefs, including an August brief to the Supreme Court opposing Trump’s 2026 executive order to curb mail voting.
Anna Baldwin, director of voting rights litigation at the Campaign Legal Center and a former 14-year lawyer in the Justice Department’s civil rights division, said the Campaign Legal Center and the Democracy Defenders Fund “have worked closely together on two ongoing lawsuits challenging the president’s unlawful voting executive orders that attempt to dictate election rules. We’ve teamed up in the supreme court on a brief filed by former state and federal judges, including noted conservative judges, that emphasized just how unlawful and dangerous the president’s efforts to dictate election rules are.” Baldwin said the two groups also worked together in federal cases in Oregon and California “to make sure that the DoJ isn’t able to seize voters’ sensitive data by making false claims about non-citizen voting.”
Sophia Lin Lakin, who leads the ACLU Voting Rights Project, said the ACLU has been involved in 26 of 30 legal challenges to the administration over the issue of seizing personal voting data from states. To date, the administration has lost 23 cases where rulings have been made, she said. The Washington Litigation Group this summer hired about half a dozen new lawyers to handle election-related litigation. “As the midterms approach with growing concerns about potential federal interference in elections, we’ve brought on more attorneys to be even more prepared to litigate sensitive matters under acute time pressure,” said James Pearce, a principal with the group.
The administration has taken other steps around voting. In July, Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the Justice Department’s civil rights division, wrote to officials in all 50 states warning that any election officer who knowingly retains noncitizens on a state’s voter list or facilitates noncitizens in casting ballots “could be subject to criminal liability.” In August, the Justice Department announced plans to send 1,000 lawyers to monitor voting nationwide. According to the Guardian, hundreds of Department of Homeland Security agents have been engaged in searching for noncitizens among registered voters, and the department’s chief has said ICE agents could be sent to polling places “if there is a threat to that polling place or we’re serving a warrant.”
In a July televised speech, Trump said that “mail-in ballots are inherently corrupt” and that noncitizen voting poses a “crisis of election security.” The Guardian reported both claims were made without evidence. Trump, who continues to blame voting fraud for his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, has voted by mail twice this year. A database maintained by the Heritage Foundation cites 100 cases of noncitizen voting over a quarter-century.
Former Justice Department lawyers said the administration’s threats to voting rights make opposition from legal advocates crucial. Stacey Young, who left the department at the start of 2025 after 18 years to found Justice Connection, a group of more than 3,000 former department lawyers and alumni, said the president has no authority over the administration of elections, “but that hasn’t stopped this president, or those he put in power at the justice department, from trying to interfere.” Former department inspector general Michael Bromwich said: “The full-out assault on democracy must be addressed through the courts because Congress has proven itself unwilling and unable to check the undemocratic steps taken by the administration.”
Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney for eastern Michigan who now teaches law at the University of Michigan, contrasted law firms’ response to Trump’s first-term travel ban with their current posture, saying “thank goodness for groups like the Democracy Defenders Fund, which are attracting top legal talent and challenging some of Trump’s lawless activities. Their work is protecting the rights of all Americans.”
Nick Brown, Washington state’s attorney general, who chairs an election protection group for the Democratic Attorneys General Association, said his group has held “strategy sessions” with the Brennan Center, States United and the Democracy Defenders Fund to prepare for potential disruptive moves by the administration in November. Of the Supreme Court appeal, Brown said: “As the court said, states’ compliance with this illegal order would be ‘practically impossible’ before the November elections given the unprecedented demands it would put on state and local elections officials. The chaos that would cause is exactly what Trump wants. That’s why we continue to fight for a fair and properly administered election.”
Baldwin voiced strong concern about the Justice Department’s push for a Supreme Court ruling that would expedite the mail-voting order. “The DoJ’s slapdash effort at getting the supreme court’s blessing to turn the USPS into a gatekeeper for mail would be a farce, if it didn’t put our fundamental right to vote in the crosshairs,” she said. “Given the importance of what is at stake, the DoJ’s continued efforts are nothing more than an attempt to foist chaos on the electoral process. But they will fail.”
Tianna Mays, the legal director of the Democracy Defenders Fund, said: “The Trump administration has declared war on the rule of law, yet our democratic guardrails are still holding. We refuse to stand by idly while this administration flouts the constitution and attempts to eviscerate our institutions.”