Dispute over postal voting: Defeat for Trump before the Supreme Court

Before the midterms

Dispute over postal voting: Defeat for Trump before the Supreme Court

In some places, postal ballots have already been sent out before the midterms, but the Trump administration continued to try to push through new rules. She is now unsuccessful in the Supreme Court.

In the legal dispute over stricter rules for postal voting in the USA has the government of President Donald Trump suffered defeat in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court declined to stay a lower court’s ruling that has so far blocked the Trump administration from implementing its new rules. The Supreme Court said it was unlikely that the government would succeed in its challenge to the lower court’s injunction on the merits.

The US government wanted to get the US Supreme Court to ensure that its stricter postal voting rules were introduced before the midterm elections in early November. The fact that this now leaves the order of a lower court in force means in practice that the states can continue to send their postal voting documents according to the standards that previously applied. In some places this has already happened.

At the end of March, Trump ordered that the US Postal Service should only send postal voting documents to people who are on a voter list previously drawn up by the states. According to critics, this would mean that the postal service would go from being a mere deliverer of election documents to a controlling body in the election process.

The US government’s move led to a legal dispute that dragged on for a long time in several courts.

A lower court federal judge in Boston halted Trump’s plans with an injunction at the end of August. The president’s decree is “a likely unconstitutional regulation that is virtually impossible to comply with in view of the 2026 midterm elections,” she wrote in her justification. It is also unrealistic to implement it so shortly before the election.

Trump appealed to an appeals court in response to the blockade, but then went to the Supreme Court before the decision was made.

As is often the case with urgent applications, the Supreme Court did not provide any detailed reasons for its decision. However, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who was once nominated by Trump for the post, said in a concurring statement on the decision that in his opinion there was too little time to adequately implement the new rules before the midterm elections.

The Supreme Court had already made a decision in the legal dispute in August. At that time, he overturned another court order against Trump’s postal voting plans – but for procedural reasons.