In March, President Donald Trump issued a blatantly illegal executive order claiming that he had the power to unilaterally rewrite US election law. The order threatens prosecutions against state officials who allow certain people to vote, and it also requires states to include several federally mandated design elements in the envelopes that they use to mail ballots to voters.
On Monday, the Supreme Court’s Republican majority allowed that order to go into effect. All three of the Court’s Democrats dissented.
Yet while the Court’s new decision in Trump v. California is troubling, it’s not necessarily a sign that the justices will permit Trump’s illegal order to take full effect. The Court’s actual holding in California is that two lower federal courts moved too quickly when they blocked the executive order. But California does not opine on whether the order is actually legal.
The Supreme Court’s decision reinstates Trump’s order for now, but there are several active cases challenging this order in the lower courts. So it is likely that a judge will issue a new decision blocking the executive order again very soon.
Still, the Court’s decision to reinstate this order, even temporarily, is likely to confuse state election officials who are racing to prepare for an upcoming election. And the provision threatening prosecutions might deter these officials from doing their jobs until that provision is blocked by another court.
The Court is divided on whether Trump’s threat targeting state elections officials is actually a threat
The case concerns two sections of Trump’s March order, one of which threatens state election officials with prosecution if they allow the wrong people to vote, and the other which appears to be an attempt to sabotage voting by mail during the 2026 midterms.
The first one of these, Section 2, itself contains two provisions, one of which orders the Department of Homeland Security to “compile and transmit to the chief election official of each State a list of individuals confirmed to be United States citizens who will be above the age of 18 at the time of an upcoming Federal election and who maintain a residence in the subject State.”
This simple command to compile a list would be unproblematic, except that the second provision of Section 2 orders the attorney general to prioritize prosecutions against “State and local officials or any others involved in the administration of Federal elections who issue Federal ballots to individuals not eligible to vote in a Federal election.” Thus, when both provisions of Section 2 are read together, they threaten prosecutions against any state official who issues a ballot to a voter whose name does not appear on Trump’s list of approved voters.
Such a threat is unconstitutional, as the Constitution gives states, and not the federal government, the power to decide who may vote in congressional and presidential elections. The justices, however, primarily split on whether to give Trump’s order a hyperliteral reading.
In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argues the two clauses are clearly connected and she cites a previous Supreme Court decision warning that “[p]eople do not lightly disregard public officers’ thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings against them if they do not come around.”
But the majority ignores Section 2’s purpose, and instead notes that Trump’s executive order does not explicitly require states to use Trump’s list of approved voters. They also note that the executive order’s call for the Justice Department to prosecute state officials does not include any reference to Trump’s list.
In any event, even the Republican justices do not hold that the Constitution permits Trump to create a list of approved voters and prosecute state officials who depart from that list. Instead, the Republicans hold that it is too soon to block Section 2. DHS must first compile its list of approved voters, or DOJ must actually prosecute someone, before a challenge to Trump’s new policy can proceed.
The effect of the Republican justices’ decision, in other words, is to leave Trump’s threat in place, but also water it down considerably: The Court does state that Trump’s executive order does not actually require states to use Trump’s approved voter list. So that may be a sign that, if Trump actually did try to prosecute someone for allowing someone not on DHS’s list to vote, the justices would reject that prosecution — but for now, there’s little standing in the way of him doing it.
The rest of the Court’s decision was obsolete the minute it was handed down
The remainder of the Court’s decision deals with Section 3 of Trump’s executive order, which orders the United States Postal Service (USPS) to design an envelope which states must use when they mail ballots to voters. It also forbids USPS from delivering ballots that do not comply with this new design.
The Republican justices conclude that the lower court decisions blocking Section 3 were also premature because, at the time when those courts handed down their decisions, USPS had not yet formally issued a rule that announces the new mandatory envelope design. But USPS issued that rule on Friday. So the Supreme Court’s decision was out of date days before the justices decided it, but that does nothing to change the immediate effect of the decision.
Among other things, the Trump administration’s new rule requires states to mail ballots in envelopes that include several federally mandated design elements, including a mandatory logo and a unique identifier for each voter. If the new rule takes effect, USPS will refuse to deliver any ballots that do not comply with these new, Trump-approved design requirements.
Democrats are significantly more likely to vote by mail than Republicans. So the Trump administration’s new rule is likely to skew the 2026 election towards his political party if it is allowed to take effect.
If Section 3 is eventually allowed to take effect, that will be a catastrophe for US democracy, and may even make it impossible for many states to hold midterm elections. That’s because the states couldn’t possibly have known what specific design requirements the Trump administration would impose on them until USPS issued its rule. Many states have already purchased envelopes that do not comply with the new federal mandate. And it’s not like new envelopes can simply be printed on the fly.
In some states, millions or even tens of millions of voters will vote by mail, which means that, in order to comply with the Trump administration’s new order, these states will somehow need to obtain truckloads of envelopes in time for this November’s election, comply with the considerable procedural requirements laid out in Trump’s order, and distribute these ballots to voters fast enough for them to actually return them by the deadline.
Several US states, moreover, conduct their elections almost entirely by mail. While these states often set up voting centers where voters can also vote in person, these in-person voting centers are merely a backup. And these states are unlikely to have the infrastructure, voting machines, or network of election workers that are required to run an entirely in-person election if mail-in voting fails.
So Trump wants to impose impossible deadlines on many states. But Monday’s decision does not actually hold that it is legal for him to do so. Indeed, the federal judge who initially blocked Trump’s executive order has already signaled that she is likely to block the USPS’s new rule. We will find out if the Supreme Court will allow Trump to sabotage voting by mail after that new decision makes its way back to the justices.
The Trump administration’s legal argument for the new USPS rule is quite thin
Trump’s lawyers only barely make a legal argument in favor of the new rule. After the USPS issued its new rule, Trump’s Justice Department did file a supplemental brief in the Supreme Court arguing that the new rule is lawful. But that brief is only three pages long, and its legal analysis is exceedingly thin.
As Indira Talwani, one of the judges who blocked Trump’s executive order, noted in her opinion, there is no federal law that explicitly “delegates authority to control mail-in voting to USPS.” So the Trump administration must rely instead on broadly worded statutes that simply state that the Postal Service may deliver mail and take related steps that are necessary to deliver the mail.
One permits USPS to adopt rules “as may be necessary in the execution of its functions.” The other permits it to “provide for the collection, handling, transportation, delivery, forwarding, returning, and holding of mail, and for the disposition of undeliverable mail.”
And, even if these vague statutes could authorize the Trump administration to impose granular restrictions on voting by mail, the fact remains that it is impossible for many states to comply with these restrictions in 2026. Some states, such as North Carolina, are supposed to start mailing ballots at the end of next week.
It would be one thing if Trump tried to impose new envelope design requirements that will take effect in future elections. But there’s simply no time for states to design compliant envelopes, get those designs approved by USPS order dozens of pallets worth of these envelopes, and distribute them to voters in time for the 2026 midterm elections.
So the stakes in this dispute remain quite high. Trump has literally issued an executive order that, if implemented, might prevent many states from holding the midterm elections in the first place. But it is still unclear if this Supreme Court will allow that to happen.
