A federal judge in Massachusetts has issued a second injunction against President Trump's 2026 executive order on mail-in voting, blocking the Postal Service from restricting ballot delivery just 83 days before the November midterm elections.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani granted a preliminary injunction on Tuesday barring USPS from implementing or enforcing Section 3 of Executive Order 14399, which would have required the Postal Service to establish new standards for mail-in ballot transmission, including delivering absentee ballots only to voters appearing on state-approved rolls. The ruling applies to the November 3 midterm elections and any earlier federal contest, Fox News reported.
It marks the second time Talwani has blocked a major piece of the executive order. In June, she issued an injunction covering 23 states and Washington, D.C., halting provisions that directed the Department of Homeland Security to compile a federal voter citizenship list, required states to submit voter registration rolls to the Postal Service, and mandated trackable ballot printing. Both rulings found the administration likely exceeded its authority by attempting to impose election requirements on states, which hold primary responsibility under the Constitution for regulating how their citizens vote.
Talwani's June ruling was blunt. AP News reported that the judge granted summary judgment in favor of Democratic state attorneys general and voting rights groups, writing plainly:
"The executive branch has no authority to regulate elections."
That ruling barred the Postal Service from implementing the order for the 2026 midterms, with Talwani noting elections were less than 90 days away. Election officials had warned that the federal voter list system could cause chaos if imposed on existing state processes.
The Trump administration challenged the June injunction at the First Circuit Court of Appeals. The appeals court rejected the request to lift the block in a 2-1 decision on July 25, keeping Talwani's order in place.
Tuesday's ruling extends the legal wall around the executive order by adding the USPS ballot-delivery restrictions to the list of provisions that cannot take effect before voters go to the polls in November.
The executive order, issued in March 2026 and titled "Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections," laid out an ambitious framework. It directed DHS to compile state-by-state lists of confirmed U.S. citizens eligible to vote, using federal databases. It instructed USPS to deliver mail-in ballots only to voters on those lists. And it directed the Justice Department to prioritize investigations into election officials who issue ballots to ineligible voters.
White House staff secretary Will Scharf defended the order's rationale when it was announced. Breitbart reported Scharf's explanation:
"We're going to take federal data, we're going to ensure that each state's election officials are provided with a comprehensive view of who the eligible voters in their jurisdiction actually are, allowing them to properly verify that everybody voting in their elections is legally able to vote."
President Trump has been direct about his concerns. "Cheating on mail-in voting is legendary. It's horrible. Democrats want to use it for cheating," he told reporters, as Fox News reported.
Over two dozen states, led by Democratic attorneys general, moved to challenge the order in court. A coalition of nonpartisan voting rights groups filed a separate challenge. Both sets of plaintiffs argued the order amounted to unlawful federal interference in state election procedures.
With two injunctions in place and the appeals court siding with the challengers, the Trump administration escalated. Solicitor General D. John Sauer filed an emergency petition asking the Supreme Court to intervene and unblock the executive order before the midterms.
Sauer's argument centered on two points. First, he contended the lower court injunctions were premature because agencies had not yet implemented concrete policy changes, the order, he argued, merely set forth "general policy guidance" leaving agencies discretion on implementation. The Washington Examiner reported Sauer's filing stated:
"The injunction is particularly remarkable because the Order merely sets forth general policy guidance, leaving substantial discretion to agencies about how to implement the Order while admonishing them that they may do so only consistent with applicable law."
Second, Sauer warned that leaving the injunction in place would cause damage that could not be undone after the fact. Just The News reported the solicitor general's argument:
"The harms to voter integrity in that election if the government's policy is not in place cannot be undone even if the government later prevails on the merits of its appeal."
Sauer also argued the challengers, both the states and the voting rights coalition, had not suffered the kind of concrete injury required to establish legal standing. If agencies eventually took specific actions that harmed them, Sauer contended, the states could challenge those actions at that time "in a non-hypothetical posture."
The Supreme Court requested a response from the coalition of Democratic states by August 3. ABC News reported that a decision could come at any time, potentially as soon as this week.
Opponents of the executive order framed the rulings as constitutional vindication. Marcia Johnson of the League of Women Voters said after the June decision: "This ruling is a victory for voters and for the Constitution." The League's Massachusetts chapter praised the court "for upholding one of our most sacred constitutional rights: the right to vote."
But the legal picture remains far from settled. Two lower courts and an appeals panel have now sided against the administration, yet the Supreme Court has not weighed in on the merits. The justices could lift one or both injunctions, let them stand, or take up the case on a longer timeline that would push any resolution past November.
U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, in a related proceeding, blocked USPS from carrying out the order's requirement that states provide voter rolls before the Postal Service would transmit ballots. Sullivan found the Postal Service's proposed approach violated its own existing agreements governing election mail handling, ruling that USPS "cannot post documents reflecting 'practices and policies for prioritizing the monitoring and timely delivery of Election Mail' if its policies provide that it will not accept 'noncompliant mailing.'"
Three months before a national election, the administration's effort to verify voter citizenship through federal databases and restrict mail-in ballot delivery remains frozen across more than half the country. The core question, whether the executive branch can direct federal agencies to impose election integrity conditions on states, now sits with nine justices who may rule any day.
The legal battle exposes a genuine tension. States have run their own elections since the founding. The Constitution assigns them that responsibility, and courts have consistently upheld it. Judge Talwani's rulings rest squarely on that principle: the executive branch lacks the authority to regulate elections, full stop.
But the administration's concern is not invented. Mail-in voting has expanded dramatically in recent cycles, and the mechanisms for verifying that every ballot goes to an eligible citizen vary widely from state to state. The executive order attempted to use existing federal data, immigration records, citizenship databases, to give state officials a clearer picture of who is eligible. Whether that amounts to helpful information-sharing or unlawful federal overreach is the question the Supreme Court must now answer.
The administration's solicitor general put the stakes plainly: if the order stays blocked and the midterms proceed without its provisions, any integrity gaps that existed before the order will persist, and no after-the-fact ruling can undo ballots already cast and counted.
The states counter that the order would have created confusion, not clarity, injecting an untested federal list into election systems already operating under established state law, with barely enough time for officials to adapt.
Both sides now wait on the Supreme Court. The midterms do not.
When courts tell a president he cannot use federal agencies to verify who is voting in federal elections, voters deserve to know whether that principle protects their rights, or just protects the status quo from scrutiny.
