Texas and Kansas AG transitions leave GOP mail-ballot case in question

Judge Nichols’ injunction blocks USPS plan for all federal elections, including 2028

Voting for this year’s midterm elections just concluded, but it is not clear how long some of the twelve Republican state attorneys general will continue their case to revive U.S. Postal Service mail-ballot restrictions in time for the 2028 election. Democratic candidates are set to take control of the Texas and Kansas attorney general’s offices in January, after Democrats won up and down the ballot in the midterms.

On Thursday, the twelve GOP state attorneys general started the process of appealing a September order by U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, one of the two judges who blocked the U.S. Postal Service from carrying out a plan released in response to an executive order by President Trump. The Republican state attorneys general bringing the appeal represent Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas.

Nichols, a Washington, D.C.-based judge who was nominated by Trump, issued a preliminary injunction that blocks the Postal Service from implementing the plan for all federal elections, including the 2028 race. The blocked rule, which the Postal Service released in late August, would require states to turn over lists of voters’ names and addresses in order to have them delivered by USPS.

Nichols found that the mailing agency likely has no power to impose that requirement on states. “As the Government concedes, the Postal Service could issue (and enforce) the Rule only if Congress gave it the authority to do so, but here no statute grants the Postal Service the power to issue key parts of the Rule,” Nichols wrote.

A separate order by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, based in Boston, stopped the Postal Service from working on its revised rule for federal ballot mail, but that order applied only to this year’s midterm elections. In September, the Supreme Court refused to pause the Talwani ruling.

It is not clear whether the Trump administration plans to appeal Nichols’ ruling by Friday’s deadline for filing a court notice. Asked about the Justice Department’s plans, DOJ spokesperson Matthew Tragesser replied in an email that the department doesn’t comment on ongoing litigation.

The administration’s earlier push to put these new restrictions in place for the midterms alarmed many election officials, who were concerned about last-minute changes causing major disruptions to the tens of millions who regularly vote by mail. Some voters with disabilities and those in places without polling sites, they feared, could have lost the ability to exercise their right to cast a ballot.

A whistleblower report claimed the online system officials would need to use to follow USPS’ revised ballot requirements had not been properly tested and could have resulted in many eligible voters not getting their mail-in ballots in time or at all.

While the Supreme Court ultimately stopped implementation of the USPS rule for the midterms, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented from that ruling. Fellow conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh said in a concurring opinion that he believed state and local election officials did not have enough time to “reasonably implement the rule” this time, but noted that “there is at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service’s statutory authority.”

Reporting by Hansi Lo Wang; edited by Benjamin Swasey.