Donald Trump is using the United States Postal Service to steal American votes. That is what U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani has twice found likely to be happening, and it is what the administration has now asked the Supreme Court to allow. Talwani has blocked the USPS rule in two rulings, warning in the most recent that states gearing up to mail ballots later this month are “unable to pivot this late in the election cycle, nearly guaranteeing significant disenfranchisement for eligible voters.” The administration filed at the First Circuit and the Supreme Court in the same window; rulings could come as soon as this week, in the manner of the shadow docket — emergency relief on an election eve, without merits briefing or oral argument.
The executive order instructing the Postal Service to demand state voter rolls and reject ballot envelopes lacking specific barcodes was signed in March. Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia sued. Talwani, an Obama appointee, blocked the rule on the ground that the agency has no statutory authority to set conditions on federal elections. The administration has cited Trump’s invocation of illegal voting by non-U.S. citizens — an admittedly rare problem — as the policy basis. USPS calls the rule “modest data and mail preparation requirements.”
The steel-man runs roughly this. The President directs executive-branch agencies, which have legitimate operational interests in knowing what is moving through their systems. Even taken at its strongest, the argument collapses at the authority point — and the administration’s brief knows it, which is why it cites no evidence of the mail-voting fraud the rule is supposed to catch. None.
The audit starts where the steel-man ends. The rule is not modest. Oregon — a fully vote-by-mail state since 2000 — has no fallback infrastructure to speak of. Washington’s elections director, Stuart Holmes, told the court the state “no longer has large-scale election-day infrastructure in place to accommodate a significant shift away from vote-by-mail.” Hawaii’s chief election officer, Scott Nago, said there is “simply insufficient time to coordinate the necessary polling places, volunteers, and logistical framework” the rule would require. Wisconsin’s Republican-appointed elections chair, Don Millis, said in a sworn declaration that compliance by the state’s Sept. 17 mailing deadline is “an impossibility for many jurisdictions” — small, rural counties with a single employee handling all election work would have to print stickers and apply them by hand, to envelopes USPS will otherwise refuse to deliver. About one in three voters cast ballots by mail in the last two federal elections. The agency defending the rule has no statutory authority to regulate how states run federal elections. It delivers mail.
The Supreme Court is being asked to take this case on the shadow docket. The Brennan Center’s tracker has documented the second Trump administration’s extraordinary reliance on emergency applications, and the matching pattern of the Court siding with the administration in the overwhelming majority of them. Vladeck’s work on shadow-docket abuse has identified this as the structural pattern: rights-changing outcomes reached without the merits process that ordinary procedure would require, on the strength of the executive’s preference alone. The Court built this docket. The Court will now be asked to use it.
The history-and-tradition case for federal elections runs through the Constitution’s text. Article I, Section 4 assigns the “Times, Places and Manner” of federal elections to state legislatures, subject to congressional override. Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. 684 (2019), reminded that federal courts have refused to police partisan gerrymandering under the Constitution precisely because such questions are committed to the political branches. That doctrine cuts the other way here: the political branches most directly accountable for running elections are the states, not the executive. The President has no enumerated power over election administration. What he has is an executive order, a compliant Postmaster General, and an emergency docket at the Court he has spent a decade reshaping.
An honest application of the Court’s own major-questions doctrine would dispose of this. Congress has not authorized USPS to set ballot-envelope specifications. The Court cannot find the words. The same Court that invoked the major-questions doctrine to constrain agency action in West Virginia v. EPA, 597 U.S. 697 (2022), cannot, on this record, find it inapplicable when an executive-branch agency moves to disenfranchise a third of the electorate. Trump v. Hawaii, 585 U.S. 667 (2018), gave the President broad authority over immigration because the statute gave him broad authority. No statute gives USPS authority over elections. The election-administration power the Court reserved to the political branches in Rucho belongs, by the Constitution’s text, to the states.
The testing has not been completed either. A whistleblower reported last week that the Postal Service’s online portal — the system state election officials would use to turn over their voter lists — had not been properly tested, and the agency’s inspector general has opened an independent review. Postmaster General David Steiner said USPS was taking the concerns “seriously” but had confirmed only that the rollout would happen “sometime” this week. Steiner said the agency’s “standards for quality, security, and system integrity were not compromised” during the “accelerated” development. That sentence is the audit. “Accelerated development” is the phrase an agency uses when it is shipping something it has not built.
The harms fall on the voters the rule’s burdens hit hardest. Disabled voters who cannot navigate in-person polling places. Out-of-state college students whose home-state mail ballot is their only practical route. Voters needing language assistance unavailable at the polls. Military families like Kelsi Kiper — a Texas-registered voter stationed out of state with her active-duty husband — now considering $2,000 in flights and rental cars to vote in person on a single-income military budget. Sarah Streyder of the Secure Families Initiative, also a plaintiff, warns that many service members register through state civilian forms without identifying themselves as UOCAVA-covered, and could find their ballots trapped in a USPS system that does not have their name on the list at the moment of dispatch. A single port call before going back underwater is one chance. Overseas voters like Ann Madden of the Association of Americans Resident Overseas had a Pennsylvania primary ballot mailed from France arrive too late to be counted.
Voting by mail is a lawful, long-standing practice that one in three American voters rely on. Disenfranchising them weeks before a midterm, without statutory authority and without evidence of fraud, is not a “modest data and mail preparation requirement.” It is the executive branch trying to win an election by preventing voters from casting ballots the executive branch cannot legally control. If the Justices lift the block, the administration will have stolen this election through the mail — with the Court’s permission, not its hands.