Supreme Court lets Trump mail-voting order proceed for now

The court also granted a similar application filed by Alabama and 11 other states.

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His efforts to encourage Congress to pass his SAVE America Act legislation that would impose new voting restrictions nationwide, including proof of citizenship to register to vote and voter ID, have so far failed.

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The Trump administration told the Supreme Court the new regulations did not go as far as the executive order anticipated, saying the Postal Service "will not refuse to transmit ballots" even if senders are not on a state list of registered voters.

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Both lawsuits had challenged Trump's order as unconstitutional.

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The judge rejected the administration's arguments, finding that the suit was not filed too soon and that the states had legal standing because they would face election administration disruption, compliance costs and a credible threat of criminal prosecution.

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"Several Federal laws, including 18 U.S.C. 1015 and 611, prohibit foreign nationals from registering to vote or voting in Federal elections. Yet States fail adequately to vet voters' citizenship, and, in recent years, the Department of Justice has failed to prioritize and devote sufficient resources for enforcement of these provisions," the executive order reads.

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"[It] directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to take appropriate action to create and distribute State Citizenship Lists. This provision is an internal directive from the President to a subordinate. It imposes no obligations on the States, so they 'suffer no concrete harm from' it, and without concrete harm, there is no standing," the court wrote.

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Fox News Digital has not reviewed any particular case of election fraud tied to the LA mayoral race.

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Trump has repeatedly likened voting by mail to cheating, despite his own use of it and overwhelming evidence that the system is secure.

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A 2025 Brookings Institution study found roughly four cases of fraud for every 10m mail ballots cast.

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The wrangling over how US voters can cast their ballots comes less than 100 days until November's midterm elections, which will decide the balance of power in the US Senate and House of Representatives.

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Democratic voters are deemed more likely to cast their ballots by mail than Republicans: about one in four registered Democrats did so in 2024, according to the States United Democracy Center, alongside one in five registered Republicans.

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About 30% of all ballots were cast by mail in the 2024 presidential election, according to federal data.

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Another part of Trump's executive order instructs the Postal Service to impose new mandates on states that want to send ballots through the mail, requiring that they submit their own lists of eligible voters to the agency and include information on ballot envelopes to allow those ballots to be tracked.

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The president's order required states to submit lists of eligible voters to the US Postal Service. The agency would be barred from delivering ballots mailed by states to people not on those lists. It also required states to use tracking barcodes on ballot envelopes. And it "prioritized" federal prosecution of state election officials who send or receive ballots to non-citizens or others ineligible to vote.

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The high court's 10-page order, handed down in an unsigned opinion over the dissent of the court's three liberal justices, means that the Trump administration may move forward with a proposal for DHS to compile state-specific lists of people it believes are eligible to vote in the Democratic-led states that had challenged the plan in court.

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"If the Postal Service's final rule harms the states, they may challenge that rule," the court said in its order.

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The liberal justices dissented from the decision. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, wrote that they believed lower courts had the authority to rule in favor of the Democratic states now, while stressing that the high court's majority had not addressed the legality of Trump's directives on the merits.

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In the highest profile case, the court's 6-3 conservative majority gutted the Voting Rights Act in a significant ruling in late April dealing with Louisiana's congressional districts.

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In court filings, the administration suggested that a state's failure to use those lists to vet their voter rolls wouldn't constitute a crime on its own but acknowledged that it could be used as "relevant evidence" in prosecutions of crimes related to non-citizen voting.

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Federal courts in Boston blocked the order's implementation in the 23 Democratic-led states that had challenged it, but an appeals court in Washington, DC, allowed it to proceed. Trump filed an emergency appeal at the Supreme Court on July 27.

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The Boston court is also considering a separate challenge to the order brought by non-partisan voter advocacy groups. Judge Indira Talwani, nominated to the bench by President Barack Obama, issued a preliminary injunction in that case blocking the USPS directives nationwide.

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The Postal Service, for instance, had not yet issued its final regulations laying out how the order would be implemented. DHS, meanwhile, was still weighing whether it was even able to compile its lists, given the technical difficulties in amassing citizenship data from existing federal records systems.

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The liberals disagreed, writing that even in the early stages of the litigation, states had shown they were being harmed by Trump's instructions to his agencies. They pointed to how the administration has threatened to prosecute election officials for not adequately preventing non-citizen voting, with Sotomayor writing that the states have shown "credible threat that the government will initiate investigations and prosecutions because they refuse to use" the citizens lists assembled by DHS to vet their voter rolls.

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Using that information, the Postal Service will then generate and send state-specific "Mail-In and Absentee Participation Lists" to states' chief election officials on Election Day. The new rule said the lists are "primarily intended to assist election officials and law enforcement to understand who may have been mailed a ballot, in order to identify potentially anomalous incidents that may merit further investigation."

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The Postal Service "will not play any role in determining voter eligibility, maintaining voter rolls, or counting ballots," it said.

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But Talwani ruled in June that under the Constitution, only the states determine voter-eligibility requirements, and the president lacks any role in that area. The judge held that the provisions of the executive order governing DHS and the Postal Service are unconstitutional, and she blocked the Trump administration from implementing those portions for the Nov. 3 elections in the 23 states that sued.

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The Trump administration then asked the Supreme Court to intervene. The Justice Department called the district court's injunction "extraordinary" and "indefensible" because federal agencies are still considering how to implement the president's executive order.

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In addition to the 23 states, a coalition of Democratic campaign committees filed a lawsuit challenging Mr. Trump's mail voting executive order. But in that dispute, filed in Washington, D.C., lower courts rebuffed Democrats' request to prevent the directive's implementation.

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Mr. Trump has long criticized mail voting and asserted that significant numbers of noncitizens are voting in federal elections, though he has not provided evidence in support of that claim. It is illegal under federal law for noncitizens to cast ballots in U.S. elections, and instances of noncitizen-voting are rare.

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Still, with the midterm elections fast approaching, the president is pressing Congress to significantly curb mail voting and impose new requirements for voter registration. His administration has also overhauled a federal database maintained by DHS to verify citizenship and immigration status.

But a different federal judge blocked the administration's use of the centralized clearinghouse and found it had been used by some states to incorrectly remove U.S. citizens from their voter rolls.

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Meanwhile, the Justice Department has sued dozens of states to obtain their voter rolls, though judges have rebuffed those efforts.

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