U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani issued a 14-day temporary restraining order on Thursday blocking the U.S. Postal Service from enforcing key parts of a new rule that would have imposed strict requirements on how states prepare and submit mail-in ballots, halting implementation of President Trump’s executive order on mail voting less than a week before the first midterm ballots were set to go out.
It is the second time Talwani has blocked the administration’s effort to tighten mail-ballot procedures. And it came just days after the Supreme Court cleared the way for the order to move forward, making the legal whiplash as sharp as it is consequential for the roughly one-third of Americans who vote by mail.
The ruling sets up a September 3 hearing on whether a longer-term injunction should replace the temporary block. The case is almost certain to be appealed and could return to the Supreme Court before voters in the November 3, 2026 midterms finish casting their ballots.
Trump signed the executive order in March, directing changes to how mail ballots are handled at the federal level. The Postal Service then published a final rule requiring states to submit recipient information through a USPS portal and meet specific envelope and barcode requirements for outbound mail ballots to be accepted. States that failed to comply were told their ballots would not be delivered.
The rule did not determine voter eligibility or compare submissions with state voter rolls, Fox News reported. But its practical effect was sweeping: states would have needed to redesign mail ballots, update election management systems, train officials on the new portal, and upload citizen data, all on a timeline that election administrators said was impossible to meet before November.
Trump’s earlier executive order, issued last year, went further, attempting to require additional physical documentation to register to vote, including a U.S. passport, a REAL ID or military ID indicating citizenship, or a government-issued photo ID accompanied by proof of citizenship. That order was blocked on constitutional grounds related to states’ authority over elections.
The back-and-forth between the courts has been dizzying. Talwani initially blocked Trump’s order earlier this year. The Supreme Court then struck down that hold in a procedural ruling, finding that the judge had acted too soon because the USPS rule at that point was only proposed, not finalized.
Talwani removed her prior injunction in response. But once the Postal Service published its final rule, 24 states and Washington, D.C. refiled their challenges, this time pointing to a concrete, enforceable regulation rather than a hypothetical one.
That distinction mattered. The Associated Press reported that the block came less than a week before the first mail ballots were due to be sent out, and election officials had warned there was simply not enough time to revise their systems to comply with the new directives.
Talwani agreed. In her Thursday ruling, she wrote:
“Plaintiff states have neither time nor funds to design new mail ballots, seek approval of the new designs, order production of mail ballots, update their own election management systems, train election officials to use the USPS portal and upload citizen data to the portal, all before the midterms.”
The Supreme Court’s earlier procedural decision did not address the legality of Trump’s order. It simply found that Talwani had jumped the gun. Now that the USPS rule is final and enforceable, the constitutional questions are squarely before the courts again.
Talwani’s ruling went beyond logistics. She found that the Postal Service had presented no evidence of fraudulent mail-in voting to justify the rule, a point she framed in blunt terms.
The Washington Examiner reported that Talwani wrote the USPS’s “interest in correcting an unsubstantiated problem through likely unconstitutional means is dwarfed by the overwhelming risk of pervasive disenfranchisement of citizens who need access to mail ballots in order to vote.”
That language, “unsubstantiated problem” and “likely unconstitutional”, signals how the judge views the merits, not just the timing. It is a significant marker for the September 3 hearing, where the court will consider whether to impose a longer-term preliminary injunction.
A 2025 Brookings Institution report found that mail-in voting fraud was recorded in approximately four cases out of every 10 million mail ballots cast, based on an analysis of general elections from 2016 through 2022. The report itself noted that it relied in part on a database that its source acknowledged is not comprehensive, a caveat worth keeping in mind when either side cites the number.
Election integrity is not a trivial concern. Even rare fraud erodes public confidence, and the question of whether the federal government has the authority to impose uniform ballot-handling standards on states is a legitimate constitutional debate. But the administration’s case would be stronger if it rested on documented evidence rather than generalized suspicion, and the judge’s finding that USPS offered no such evidence is a problem the government will need to address on appeal.
Two dozen Democrat attorneys general filed one of the lawsuits challenging the USPS rule. New York Attorney General Letitia James, among the most prominent, issued a statement after Thursday’s ruling:
“This rule is a clear attempt by the federal government to interfere in elections it has no power to control. Today, a federal court halted it before this administration could wreak havoc on our elections.”
The ACLU also weighed in. Sophia Lin Lakin, an attorney for the organization, said the order “presses pause on an unlawful power grab that would sow chaos and confusion for the millions of voters who depend on mail ballots,” the New York Post reported.
James’s framing, that the federal government has “no power to control” state elections, tracks the core constitutional argument driving the litigation. The Constitution grants states broad authority to set the “times, places and manner” of elections, with Congress holding a separate power to override those rules. The executive branch’s role in that structure is narrower, and that is the tension the courts are now sorting out.
Whether one agrees with Trump’s policy goals or not, the legal vehicle matters. If the administration believes mail-ballot procedures need tightening, the cleaner path runs through Congress, where legislation can be debated, amended, and defended on firmer constitutional footing. Executive orders that direct a postal agency to impose election requirements on states invite exactly the kind of judicial resistance Talwani has now delivered twice.
The 14-day restraining order holds the USPS rule in place through the September 3 hearing. If the court issues a preliminary injunction, the block could extend through the midterm elections. If it declines, the administration would have a narrow window to enforce the rule, though states would almost certainly seek emergency relief from higher courts.
The case is widely expected to return to the Supreme Court. The justices’ earlier procedural ruling left the door open for a merits challenge once the USPS rule was finalized. That moment has arrived.
A separate federal judge in Washington had earlier declined to block the order, finding the challenge premature at that stage. That ruling underscored the procedural complexity, and the reality that different courts, looking at different stages of the same policy, can reach opposite conclusions.
Meanwhile, similar battles over voter eligibility requirements are playing out in other states, adding to a growing patchwork of judicial rulings on election law heading into November.
The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday’s ruling. Trump himself has long criticized mail-in voting, though he is a registered voter in Florida who uses mail ballots himself.
Nearly one-third of Americans now vote by mail. That is not a fringe practice, it is how tens of millions of citizens, including many elderly, rural, and military voters, exercise their franchise. Any effort to change how those ballots are handled deserves serious legal grounding, not just executive ambition.
The broader question the Supreme Court will eventually have to settle is whether the executive branch can use the Postal Service as a backdoor regulator of state elections. That is a question worth answering, but the answer needs to come from the right branch of government, through the right constitutional process.
Good policy built on shaky legal authority is still shaky. If the administration wants to secure mail-ballot integrity, it should build the case with evidence and take it to Congress, not keep handing federal judges reasons to say no.
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