The Supreme Court on Monday rejected President Donald Trump’s controversial plan to change how mail ballots are sent to voters across the country, rebuffing a proposal that election officials warned would have had catastrophic consequences if allowed to take effect for this year’s midterms.
In one of the most significant cases to appear on the court’s quick-turn docket in years, a majority of the justices blocked the procedure that would have given the US Postal Service the unprecedented power to withhold potentially millions of mail ballots. Even some GOP election officials cautioned that the proposal could lead to chaos and mass disenfranchisement.
The court said that the administration “is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge” but offered little explanation in its three-sentence, unsigned order. Conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.
The decision is a significant loss for the president, who for years has railed against mail voting with false allegations of extensive fraud, while continuing to vote by mail himself.
The administration had framed its proposal as a “modest” change to postal regulations intended to protect against that alleged fraud. Trump’s critics, however, described the maneuver as an unconstitutional power grab that the US Postal Service wasn’t even fully prepared to carry out.
CNN has reached out to the White House for comment.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a member of the court’s conservative wing, wrote a concurrence explaining that he thought the proposal may be within the authority of the USPS, but that “state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections.”
That appeared to be a recognition of a flood of briefs from state and local election officials who argued there simply was not time this late in the election process to implement the president’s order. But it also suggested that Kavanaugh could be gettable for the president, along with Alito and Thomas, to try the changes for a future election.
In his dissent, Alito said he didn’t believe the practical concerns of implementing the rule raised by many election officials was enough for the states and voting rights groups that challenged the rule to win.
“The government has a strong interest in enforcing the rule, and implementing it will also ‘enhance the visibility of Federal Ballot Mail’ in order to better detect election fraud,” Alito wrote. “On the other side of the balance, the plaintiff States invoke the practical effects of implementing the rule close to the midterm elections. I take that problem very seriously, but it is not enough to convince me to deny the application.”
“That Hail Mary pass is unlikely to be successfully completed here,” Alito wrote. “The Postal Service has broad authority to regulate the mail.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/14/politics/supreme-court-rejects-trump-plan-to-... Not a big loss. A temporary setback.
The timing is the issue, not the principle, not the authority of the Executive to make the rule, nor for the Postal Service to implement and regulate mail-in vote with sufficient lead-in time.
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