The Supreme Court on Monday rejected President Donald Trump's bid to restrict mail ballots for the midterm elections, capping a flurry of last-minute legal action with voting already underway.
The decision allows states to continue sending out mail ballots under the same processes they’ve used for years and have accounted for nearly a third of votes cast.
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The ruling represents a stark defeat for Trump on an issue he has consistently emphasized as vital to ensuring election integrity, even though there is virtually no evidence of fraud with mail ballots.
The Supreme Court majority didn’t detail its reasoning, as is typical for its emergency docket. Two justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, publicly dissented from the brief order.
The Trump administration had asked the court, once again at the center of a roiling political controversy, to clear the way for restrictions before the pivotal November contests for control of Congress.
The regulations being challenged were from an executive order Trump issued earlier this year. Trump had ordered ballot envelope designs to be pre-approved by the Postal Service and that states upload the identities of those who are to receive them to a still-inactive online portal.
The order also sought to give the U.S. Postal Service power to decide which ballots get mailed.
Election officials in some states said the orders would make it impossible to implement the changes this close to a general election. Some opponents argued that Trump’s order violated the constitutional right of states to administer elections, and that it gave the Postal Service powers that went beyond its intended purpose. Alito, in his dissent Monday, wrote that the Postal Service “has broad authority to regulate the mail” and likely does have the power to enforce Trump's restrictions.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed that the restrictions should not go into effect for the midterms but indicated he might rule in favor of the Trump administration if the issue comes back before the court at a later time.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mail ballots are already being sent to voters
In North Carolina, where mail-in ballots started going out on Sept. 4, the decision keeps the state’s current voting process in place.
State election officials told WRAL before Monday’s Supreme Court decision that they were prepared to make any changes if courts ultimately allowed the Trump administration’s new rules to go forward. Officials previously said the state already has in place the envelope security features that had been ordered by Trump’s, but they might have had to take additional steps to fully comply with the database measures.
Opponents of the ruling told WRAL Monday morning that if the high court ruled in favor of Trump, it could cause legitimate ballots to be rejected.
“What we are going to do is turn every ounce of our righteous anger into righteous mobilizing, because we are in a state of emergency,” Bishop William J. Barber II, a longtime advocate for voting access, said Monday morning at a news conference in Raleigh. Barber brought together other faith leaders and voting-rights advocates, who said they are concerned about changing the mail-in voting process after voting has already begun in North Carolina.
'At the last minute'
The possibility of losing mail-in voting over non-compliance with Trump’s order could have affected a large swath of voters. More than 1 million North Carolinians voted by mail in 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic discouraged many from going to cast a ballot in person. In 2024, about 300,000 North Carolinians voted by mail. As of Sunday, 1,627 absentee ballots had been cast in North Carolina, nearly matching the 1,648 cast at this same point in the 2022 general election, according to the State Board of Elections’ data.
Democratic Attorney General Jeff Jackson, who involved the state in the lawsuit, has said Trump’s order was unconstitutional regardless. The lawsuit says the U.S. Constitution puts individual states, and not the federal government, in charge of setting election rules. Plus, Jackson said, any rules that could shut down mail-in voting access could disenfranchise people who have few or no other options.
“Ballots in North Carolina have already started going out and coming back. The election is underway,” Jackson said in a social media post Monday night, after the Supreme Court had ruled. “It would have been impossible for the Postal Service to implement a whole new system in time for the election — especially since the new system doesn’t even exist yet.”
This article was compiled with reporting from the Associated Press and WRAL state government reporters Caroline Yaffa and Will Doran.