A mailbox for ballots is seen at a polling place on November 4, 2025 in Arlington, Virginia. (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
On Monday, the Trump administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay a district court ruling that blocked President Donald Trump’s sweeping March 31 order limiting mail-in voting.
The decision came just two days after a federal appeals court rejected the administration’s request to revive a controversial plan that would have imposed significant restrictions and requirements on states collecting voter information for absentee voting.
It also sets off a high-stakes confrontation in the Supreme Court between the administration and the 23 states that sued over Trump’s executive order, just over three months before midterm elections that will decide control of Congress.
“The district court issued an emergency injunction prohibiting federal agencies from applying an executive order promoting election integrity in the upcoming federal election in November,” wrote Solicitor General D. John Sauer in his application to the Supreme Court.
Sauer argued that the executive order should not be blocked because, among other things, the U.S. Postal Service has not yet issued final regulations on how it will be implemented.
Ruling of the court of appeal
A three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed a lower court ruling last month which blocked the order because the U.S. Constitution gives states – not the president – the power to administer elections.
The executive order “orders an unprecedented level of involvement by federal officials in the way states administer elections,” wrote the two appellate judges, Gustavo A. Gelpí and Julie Rikelman. order for Saturday. Both were appointed by President Joe Biden.
Gelpí and Rikelman considered and rejected the administration’s argument that states could not challenge the order because Postal Service regulations had not yet been finalized.
The order directed the agency’s final rule to include a requirement for states to begin filing voter rolls 60 days after the general election on Sept. 4 of this year. Allowing the order to go into effect would force states that have been preparing for months to devote significant time and resources to creating a recent electoral system in just a few weeks.
“The government has not persuaded us that the (executive order’s) impact on the Plaintiffs is ‘hypothetical,'” Gelpí and Rikelman wrote.
The panel’s third judge, Joshua D. Dunlap, partially agreed and partially disagreed with that opinion, noting that the Postal Service rule imposed by the executive order had not yet been finalized. But he added that the timeline suggested in the order would require states to take immediate action on absentee ballots.
Consequences for countries
The Trump administration is running out of time to effectively implement mail-in voting restrictions ahead of the November midterm elections 99 days from Monday.
The 1st Circuit panel cited the upcoming midterms as a reason to temporarily block the order. A full review of the ordinance could be considered over a longer time horizon, but state election officials faced inevitable consequences if they did not begin preparing to meet the ordinance’s requirements in time for the November general election and September primary, the justices said.
The order directed the U.S. Postal Service to require states to notify the agency 90 days before an election if they plan to utilize absentee ballots and, if so, to send the list of eligible voters to the federal government at least two months before the election and before mailing ballots to those voters.
Democratic officials in 23 states – California, Massachusetts, Nevada, Washington, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – and the District of Columbia have filed lawsuits challenging the executive order.
Twelve states with Republican attorneys general – Alabama, Missouri, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas – joined the call on the federal government’s side.
Citizenship lists
The executive order also required the Department of Homeland Security, with the assistance of the Social Security Administration, to compile lists of voting-age citizens residing in each state and then report that information to state officials at least 60 days before each federal election.
According to the ordinance, the list of citizens would be drawn up from naturalization and social security registers. It would also include data from SAVE, a powerful computer program maintained by the Department of Homeland Security that verifies citizenship by comparing names with information in federal databases.
District Court Judge Indira Talwani found that the executive order failed to invoke appropriate constitutional or legal authority to justify the creation of the lists.
Trump is questioning faith in mail-in ballots
Trump has consistently raised unfounded concerns about mail-in voting, which almost every state and some only allow.
The practice, particularly common in Western countries, enjoyed robust bipartisan support until Trump tried to undermine its credibility during the 2020 election cycle.
According to the Pew Research Center, in 2018, 71% of voters, including 57% of Republicans, supported voting by mail.
Until then April 2026 pollDemocrats’ positive view of mail-in voting remained high, but Republican support dropped to 34%.
In the executive order, Trump said that restricting mail-in voting would restrict foreigners from voting, another voting issue that Trump has often raised without providing evidence that it caused a stern integrity issue in any election.
