Two federal courts told Donald Trump the Constitution does not give him power over elections. He asked the Supreme Court to override them. The justices let the rulemaking proceed on a procedural technicality. The rule got finalized, a judge blocked it again, and Trump went back to the Court for a third try on Sunday. North Carolina is already sending out ballots. The evidence of the fraud he says he is stopping is still zero.
The pattern is the story. A president who treats court losses as procedural delays on the way to getting what he wants, and a Supreme Court majority that keeps opening the door for him.
The order that started this
Trump signed an executive order on March 31 titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.” It directed the U.S. Postal Service to impose new requirements on mail ballots and directed Homeland Security to compile state-by-state lists of eligible citizen voters.
Section 3 is the provision that matters. Under it, USPS would refuse to transmit a mail ballot unless the voter appeared on a state-specific participation list maintained through a federal system. The Postal Service, an independent agency Congress deliberately insulated from presidential politics, would become the gatekeeper for who receives a ballot.
California and 22 other states sued. The ACLU, Brennan Center, and a coalition of voting rights groups filed a separate suit on behalf of the League of Women Voters. Their argument was simple: the Constitution gives states and Congress the power to regulate elections, not the president.
The courts said no. The Supreme Court opened the door.
Boston-based U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani has now blocked this scheme twice. In June, she ruled that key parts of the executive order were unconstitutional and legally void, barring federal agencies and USPS from using it to interfere with voter rolls or mail ballots in the plaintiff states. In August, she issued a nationwide preliminary injunction blocking Section 3 for every federal election on or before November 3, also reported by Axios and the Associated Press.
Then the Supreme Court’s conservative majority handed Trump a preliminary win. In an unsigned 6-3 ruling on August 24, the justices set aside Talwani’s order and allowed federal agencies to continue working toward complying with Trump’s order. The majority found the case wasn’t “ripe” because no final rule had been issued yet. But the rule was finalized days later, triggering the current round of litigation.
The court wrote something that should have been a warning to the administration but has instead functioned as a green light: “The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful. On that score, time will tell.”
Justice Sotomayor dissented, joined by Kagan: “Today’s decision does not address whether the President’s attempts to interfere with States’ administration of the November 2026 elections are lawful. Nor does it suggest that the Executive Branch has any constitutional or statutory authority to implement the President’s directives.” Justice Jackson dissented separately, calling the ruling what it is: a decision that “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.”
Then the USPS finalized its 95-page rule in late August. The rule requires new ballot envelope designs, barcode data uploads through a federal portal, and procedures for how the federal government collects data from mail ballots. On September 4, Talwani blocked it again.
Her language was blunt. “Immediate implementation of the Final Rule issued less than seventy days before the November 2026 election threatens disenfranchisement of millions of United States citizens who seek to vote by mail.” On the other side? “The record includes no evidence relating to fraudulent mail voting to support the rushed implementation of the Final Rule.”
She found compliance is “practically impossible.” States “have neither time nor funds to design new mail ballots, seek approval of the new designs, order production of mail ballots, update their own election management systems, train election officials to use the USPS portal, and upload citizen data to the portal, all before the midterms.”
The third appeal
On Sunday, the Trump administration filed its third emergency application to the Supreme Court. Solicitor General John Sauer argued the requirements are “modest,” covering envelope design, addressee information, and barcode data through a federal portal.
He also argued that Talwani’s order, not the rushed rule, is causing “confusion.” This is the administration’s position: a judge who blocks an unconstitutional rule 70 days before an election is the one causing chaos. The president who imposed the rule six months ago, whose agencies spent months drafting it, whose Supreme Court majority let the rulemaking proceed, and who is now asking for a third override, is apparently not the one causing confusion.
North Carolina began sending mail ballots last week, as required by state law. State Attorney General Jeff Jackson said: “The ballots are printed, the process is underway, and North Carolinians deserve a lawful and orderly election.” If the Supreme Court sides with the administration, elections in North Carolina and every other state that relies on mail voting descend into chaos.
About 30% of the nation’s voters cast ballots by mail in 2024. In California, it is 80%.
The fraud that does not exist
Trump’s order declares that barcodes and federal lists are needed to prevent fraud and confirm that only citizens receive and cast ballots. The record contains no evidence of this fraud. Talwani found it “devoid of evidence” supporting noncitizen voting through mail ballots and devoid of support for the claim that illegal or fraudulent absentee voting justified the order.
This matters because the administration’s case depends on an emergency that does not exist. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has been willing to treat the president’s claims as plausible enough to let rulemaking proceed while the courts sort out the details. But the details are the harm. Every day the rule stays in play, election officials have to prepare for two incompatible futures: one where they send ballots the way they always have, and one where they have to redesign envelopes, upload voter data to a federal portal, and get approval from USPS.
The ACLU’s Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the Voting Rights Project, put it directly: “The president does not get to rewrite the rules of voting, and he certainly does not get to treat voters as collateral damage in his campaign to control state-run elections.”
The pattern is the story
Trump has a documented history of seeking federal control over election infrastructure. He told The New York Times in January that he regretted not sending the U.S. military to seize voting machines after his 2020 defeat. He publicly suggested Republicans should “nationalize” elections, drawing criticism from local election officials and members of his own party, including Senate GOP leader John Thune.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, had to write a letter to Sen. Elissa Slotkin in August formally pledging that the military has “no plans to send Federal military personnel or Federalized members of the National Guard to polling places during the 2026 elections” and “no plans to use such personnel to seize ballots, voting machines, or other election-related material.” He wrote: “I have neither received nor anticipate receiving any unlawful order concerning the role of the Joint Force in the upcoming November 2026 midterm elections.”
That letter exists because the president of the United States said he wished he had used the military to overturn an election. The mail ballot appeals exist because he is trying a different route to the same destination.
The Constitution is not ambiguous here. Article I, Section 4 gives states the power to regulate congressional elections, with Congress holding the authority to alter those rules. The president is not in that sentence. The Postal Reorganization Act gives USPS broad power to move mail, not to decide whether a state may send a ballot to a voter. Trump’s theory converts authority over envelopes and barcodes into authority over the franchise itself. If USPS can decide which ballots move through the mail, the executive branch can decide which voters receive them. That is election administration, which the Constitution does not give the president.
The strongest version of the administration’s argument is that states have a legitimate interest in verifying citizenship and that USPS is just setting operational standards for mail ballots. That argument collapses on contact with the record. The requirements are practically impossible to implement in 70 days. The fraud evidence is zero. The rule was finalized weeks before the election. And the administration has asked the Supreme Court to override lower courts three times. That is not a response to an operational problem. It is a campaign to federalize election administration through an agency that Congress designed to be independent.
The Supreme Court knows this. The August 24 ruling was a punt, not an endorsement. But a punt that lets the rulemaking proceed while ballots are being sent is a punt with real consequences. Every lower court that has looked at the merits has reached the same conclusion: this is unconstitutional. The question is whether six justices care more about the Constitution than about giving this president one more procedural window to run out the clock.
The Supreme Court should shut this down. Not with another procedural punt that leaves the door cracked. With a ruling on the merits that says what every judge who has looked at this has already said: the president does not get to regulate elections. The Constitution says so. The courts have said so. The evidence says so. The only thing left is whether six justices will say so.
If they don’t, the message is clear: court losses are just delays, and the president can keep asking until he gets the answer he wants. That is not how the rule of law works. Or at least, it is not how it is supposed to.