Late Monday night, the Supreme Court handed American voters one of the biggest wins of the year, and it did so in two quiet sentences. The President’s plan to put the Postal Service in charge of screening your mail ballot is blocked for the 2026 elections.
If you’ve been reading Bright America for a while, you know we’ve been following (and fueling) this fight all summer — and here’s what you should know:
The plan, in plain English
Back on March 31, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at mail voting. It directed the Postal Service to write new rules for how ballots travel through the mail. The final version of those rules landed on August 21, about ten weeks before Election Day, over the objections of more than 200,000 public comments.
The rules said every mail ballot envelope in the country would need a special logo, a machine-readable design, and a unique barcode tied to each individual voter. Every state would have to upload the name and address of every mail voter into a new federal “Ballot Portal” run by the post office. Then, before accepting any ballot mail, postal workers would check each envelope against that list. Envelopes that failed the check would be refused and sent back.
For as long as mail voting has existed, the roles have been clear. Election officials decide who is eligible to receive a ballot. The post office delivers it, the same way it delivers your birthday cards and jury summonses. Under the new rules, the post office would suddenly sit in judgment of ballots, with the power to turn them away. And the federal government would hold a national list of everyone who votes by mail, built inside an agency the president had already ordered to restrict the practice.
More than 50 million pieces of ballot mail are expected to move through the postal system this election. That’s how much was suddenly up for review.
Sixty days is not enough time to rewire an election
Our strategic litigation partner Campaign Legal Center (CLC), the nonpartisan legal nonprofit you’ve met in these pages before, put an expert named Tammy Patrick in front of the court. Patrick has spent more than twenty years working where elections and the mail meet, and President Obama once appointed her to a bipartisan commission on election administration. Her assessment of the rule was blunt. It was “unprecedented,” and implementing it before November would be “virtually impossible.”
The details from her declaration read like a prank on local governments. Election offices could no longer hand ballot trays to their own mail carrier or use a collection box. They would have to haul everything to special postal counters. If a single envelope in a mailing failed inspection, the entire mailing could be rejected. Travis County, Texas had already spent $21,349 on envelopes that would have become useless overnight. The election office in Madison, Wisconsin was looking at more than $10,000 to reprint theirs. North Carolina started mailing ballots on September 4, while the ink on the rule was barely dry.
This wasn’t a partisan panic, either. Ricky Hatch, the Republican county clerk in Weber County, Utah, told the New York Times he had drawn up plans to abandon mail voting entirely if the rule survived. Seven secretaries of state from Republican-led states asked the courts to stop it.
Two courts said no in a single weekend
On September 13, a federal judge in Washington blocked the rule in the case Campaign Legal Center brought with its co-counsel on behalf of the League of United Latin American Citizens, a military families group called Secure Families Initiative, the Arizona Students’ Association, the city of Madison, and Travis County. The judge was Carl Nichols, whom President Trump appointed during his first term. His reasoning was almost elegant in its simplicity. Congress created the Postal Service to deliver mail. No law anywhere gives it the power to run a voter enrollment system or refuse lawful ballots. Lawyers call that acting “ultra vires,” which is Latin for beyond your powers. The rest of us might call it staying in your lane.
The next evening, the Supreme Court declined to rescue the rule in a parallel case brought by California and other states. The Court said plainly that the government is “unlikely to succeed” in defending it. Justice Brett Kavanaugh added that forcing the rule onto this election would be “arbitrary and capricious” because officials simply have no time to comply. Only Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented. All three of the president’s own Supreme Court appointees let the block stand without a word of protest.
Where a dollar does the most work
Every election year, billions of dollars pour into campaigns. Those races matter, and we’re not telling anyone to stop caring about them. But think about what this one legal fight just protected — mail ballots for tens of millions of voters. In all fifty states. In every race on every ballot, from the Senate down to the school board. No campaign, no matter how well funded, can win an election where the ballots never arrive.
John Adams wrote that we should be “a government of laws, and not of men.”
When the rules themselves are under attack, defending the rules has to come first, because every hard-fought victory at the polls depends on the votes being delivered, counted, and honored. This is why Bright America treats strategic litigation as core infrastructure for democracy, and why we’re so proud to help fuel the work Campaign Legal Center is doing in courtrooms across the country. Because a political campaign contribution helps one candidate in one race for one cycle; while a lawsuit won protects every voter in every race, sometimes for a generation.
More is coming, and that’s exactly why this matters
Monday’s order blocks the rule for this election while the lawsuits continue, and Justice Kavanaugh left the door open for a future version with better timing. The same executive order also contains other schemes still working their way through the system, including a federal “citizenship list” built from famously unreliable databases. Nobody involved in this work is spiking the football and going home.
We should and do expect more of this in the days and weeks before the midterms, and more after that. When one scheme to meddle with our elections gets blocked, this administration reaches for the next one. The attacks are coming faster than at any point in living memory, and they are drawn up by people with the full power of the federal government behind them.
The reason those attacks keep failing is the deep bench of brilliant, prepared, relentless lawyers who wake up every morning and go to work defending our rights, our freedoms, and the Constitution itself. They read every new rule the moment it drops. They have plaintiffs lined up, experts like Tammy Patrick on call, and briefs half-drafted before the other side finishes its press release. That is how a rule published on August 21 could be dead in the water by September 14. Speed like that takes years of quiet preparation, and preparation takes steady support.
To put it bluntly, without these lawyers, the republic would almost certainly be lost already. With them, and with the people who fund their fights — our fights — it holds.
But this morning, ballots are already in the mail in more than a dozen states, headed to kitchen tables where voters will fill them out in peace. The referees held. The rules held. Your investment in the rule of law held.
We’ll take the win — but we’re not abandoning the watchtower.
I believe this rule was concocted with Hispanic voters in mind, because there are so many similar names, like Juan Lopez-Garcia or Maria Hernandez-Santiago. The forces of evil were looking forward to purging Hispanic voters en masse because so many non-citizen residents have identical names.
This is Great News, however, this does Not stop Trump, DeJoy and his goonies from sabotaging voting by mail. And his flunkies love to do large voters purges. What else is being done to keep our Elections safe and secure from cheaters like the republicans, MAGA and other illegal forces??!!! We need to be ahead of their bull 💩💩💩💩 !!!