Seven weeks before the Nov. 3 midterm elections and with three states having already mailed ballots to voters, the Supreme Court on Monday blocked the Trump administration’s effort to restrict voting by mail.
President Trump had issued an executive order in March to create a national list of citizens that would determine voter eligibility, even though it is the states, rather than the federal government, that are responsible for regulating elections under the Constitution.
Under the order that was struck down by the Supreme Court, states would have been required to upload a voter list to a yet-to-be unveiled federal mail ballot portal. Voters would be assigned a scannable bar code that would then appear on United States Postal Service-approved envelopes for all mail ballots, allowing the Postal Service to randomly scan ballots to check the recipients against the list of voters in the portal. A mismatched bar code would result in rejection of the ballot, and according to The New York Times, could have delayed an entire bulk mailing.
Had states not provided their voter data, they could be denied services for election mail completely.
Multiple states and voting rights advocates sued to block the rule, arguing that redesigning ballots so close to Election Day would have been likely to cause delays or a confusing and chaotic vote.
Lower courts had struck down components of the executive order, but the administration appealed, asking the court on Sept. 6 to allow its mail-in voting rules to take effect before the midterm elections.
In an opinion concurring with Monday’s 7-to-2 vote to deny the administration’s appeal, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that, while “there is at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service’s statutory authority . . . applying the rule in the 2026 elections would be arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections.”
More than 30 percent of Americans voted by mail in the 2022 and 2024 elections, including the president, who this year did so twice already yet regularly claims without evidence that mail-in voting is vulnerable to fraud. He has claimed fraud in at least six elections including his primary election losses in 2016, the popular vote that he lost to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, the 2018 midterm elections, and, most notably, the 2020 election that he lost. The latter led to more than 60 failed legal challenges in federal and state courts.
Illegal voting is extraordinarily rare, but some observers have asserted that the president’s campaign to restrict voting by mail has nonetheless succeeded in casting doubt on the integrity of election outcomes. Asked about that potential confusion and lack of trust, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, told CNN on Tuesday that “We have been deeply concerned about the rhetoric out of the president, telling people not to trust our voting systems, telling people not to trust the ability to vote by mail, but we are working hard to make sure there are other voices to really strengthen our democracy and strengthen our ability to vote and get our voices heard.”
Polls suggest significant Democratic Party gains in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Multiple generic polls conducted this month in which voters were asked which party’s candidate they would support were the election held that day had the Democratic candidate leading the Republican candidate by 4 to 12 percentage points. An Ipsos poll conducted between Friday and Monday put the president’s approval at 35 percent, against 62 percent disapproving.
The League of Women Voters of the Hamptons, Shelter Island, and North Fork will host a virtual forum, “Voting Rights and the 2026 Midterms: Election Challenges, Threats, and Integrity,” on Sept. 30 at 6:30 p.m. on Sea-TV.
