Trump scores major win as Supreme Court clears way for mail-in voting order ahead of 2026 midterms
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that President Trump’s executive order tightening the rules around mail-in voting can be implemented ahead of the November midterm elections.
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The 6-3 decision — with liberal Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor dissenting — marks a major victory for Trump, but appears to leave room for future legal challenges that could delay the president’s order.
In its ruling, the high court overturned a lower court order that blocked the Trump administration from enforcing the March 31 mail-in voting order in response to a lawsuit filed by 23 Democratic-led states, who argued the directive unconstitutionally infringes on their authority to administer elections.
The Supreme Court did not rule on whether Trump’s order was lawful, but determined it was too early for states to sue over it because harms must be “concrete” rather than “conjectural or hypothetical.”
The majority further noted that federal courts are barred from adjudicating disputes dependent on “contingent future events that may not occur as anticipated, or indeed may not occur at all.”
Democratic New York Attorney General Letitia James, who was part of the lawsuit, vowed that the “fight is far from over.”
“This decision is a painful setback, but it will not be the final word,” James said in a statement. “The right to vote is sacred, and no administration should be allowed to put that right in jeopardy by making it harder for eligible voters to cast their ballots.
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“This fight is far from over. We are exploring our legal options.”
Trump’s executive order calls for the creation of a list of eligible voters and directed the US Postal Service (USPS) to deliver mail ballots only to people on those lists.
The USPS on Friday published a rule that would require states to provide them with lists of voters who received mail-in ballots at least 60 days before the midterm elections.
Trump has long been a staunch critic of mail-in voting, despite using the process himself to cast an absentee ballot in last week’s Florida primary election.
The president and his allies argue mail-in voting is susceptible to fraud.
In dissent, Sotomayor and Kagan argued the 23 states did have standing to sue ‘based on the credible threat that the Government will initiate investigations and prosecutions because they refuse to use the lists.”
Jackson, in a separate dissent, warned that the ruling “injects additional unknowns into the already fraught pre-election period,” including whether future challenges to the mail-in voting order, or other election-related matters, may come “too late” in the cycle.
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