Federal Judge Blocks USPS Mail Voting Rules Ahead of November Midterms

A federal judge in Boston moved to halt a new set of postal regulations just weeks before the November midterm elections, finding that states would face an impossible task trying to comply with the rules in the time remaining. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani issued a 14-day temporary block on Thursday against enforcement of requirements the U.S. Postal Service had published the previous week, which would reshape how mail ballots are designed and tracked across the country.

The rules at the center of the dispute stem from an executive order President Trump signed in March, directing the Department of Homeland Security to compile lists of confirmed U.S. citizens eligible to vote and instructing the attorney general to prioritize prosecutions against election officials who issue ballots to ineligible voters. The president has repeatedly claimed mail voting leads to widespread fraud, though he has offered no evidence to support the assertion. The Postal Service's final rule, issued in response, establishes new design requirements for mail ballot envelopes—including trackable barcodes—and requires state election officials to submit lists of intended mail-ballot recipients to an online portal. The agency would then compile that information into state-specific participation lists, though it said it would play no role in determining voter eligibility, maintaining voter rolls, or counting ballots.

Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia, joined by voting rights groups, filed suit to block the requirements, arguing that Congress never gave the Postal Service authority to set rules for federal elections or mail voting. The Constitution, they contended, grants states that power. Talwani agreed that the states faced irreparable harm. In her 11-page order, she noted that most of the plaintiff states had already ordered their mail ballots and some were required by state law to send them to eligible voters as early as the following week. "Most 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," she wrote. North Carolina alone was set to begin sending mail ballots to military and overseas voters on September 4, with several other states following in mid-September.

Talwani found that Congress did not delegate to the Postal Service the authority to regulate election mail and that the states were likely to succeed in arguing the rule was unconstitutional. She emphasized the bind the states faced: if they could not comply with the new requirements—an outcome she deemed unavoidable given the timeframe—they would violate their constitutional and state law obligations to administer elections. "Based on the record presently before the court, Plaintiff States face irreparable harm where they are required to comply with a likely unconstitutional regulation for which compliance is practically impossible as to the 2026 midterm elections, now little more than two months away," she wrote.

The Justice Department, defending the rule, argued it imposed only modest informational requirements on states and localities and did not displace a single state election law or prevent any voter from casting a mail ballot. Government lawyers characterized the rule as a regulation of the U.S. mail, not a federal takeover of election administration. They warned that if the rule were temporarily blocked and then allowed to take effect before November, states and the Postal Service would face even greater time pressure to implement it. The department is expected to appeal Talwani's decision, and the dispute could reach the Supreme Court before voters go to the polls.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, one of the 24 state officials challenging the rule, called it a clear attempt by the federal government to interfere in elections beyond its authority. "Today, a federal court halted it before this administration could wreak havoc on our elections," she said. The timing of the ruling came days after the Supreme Court, in a separate case, sided with the Trump administration on procedural grounds in an earlier lawsuit filed by 23 Democratic-led states seeking to block the executive order itself. The high court's conservative majority ruled the states had brought their challenge too early, without deciding the merits of the mail-in ballot restrictions the president sought to impose. That decision left the door open for further legal battles as the midterms approach.