What Happened
On August 24, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemingly handed President Trump a legal win, clearing the way for his administration to pursue new federal requirements for mail-in ballots ahead of the 2026 election.
Supporters called it a win. Critics called it judicial overreach.
The ruling hinged on timing. A district judge had blocked Executive Order 14399. Issued on March 31, the order directs the Postal Service to create new tracking and verification requirements for federal-election ballots, including a system intended to ensure ballots are sent only to eligible United States citizens. The most contested piece was that USPS could refuse to carry ballot mail that doesn’t meet the new requirements, potentially delaying or blocking ballots without voters knowing why.
But in response to an emergency appeal by the Trump administration, the Supreme Court overturned the original block. The unsigned decision explained that the states and other organizations challenging the executive order had sued before the Postal Service had caused them any harm. It hadn’t issued a final rule or created the system it would use to fulfill the president’s order.
Three days after the Court’s ruling, USPS having finalized its rule, the same district court judge blocked it. That block then became a nationwide preliminary injunction on Sept. 4. On Sept. 10, a federal appeals court refused to lift that injunction, finding the rule likely violates the Constitution and would “likely result in the disenfranchisement of millions of voters.” The administration went back to the Supreme Court the same day with a third emergency request to let the rule take effect.
Since then, the fight has only intensified. A USPS whistleblower has raised concerns about the readiness and reliability of the online portal being built to implement the requirements, and the Postal Service’s inspector general says it plans an independent review of the allegations. States, election officials, and other groups have filed briefs urging the Supreme Court to keep the rule blocked, while the Trump administration continues to push for a nationwide rollout. Ballots have already been mailed in some states.
The Supreme Court could weigh in at any moment.
So how did a district court judge block a policy just days after the Supreme Court cleared an earlier hurdle? And with voting already underway, what could the legal whiplash mean for Utah voters this fall?
Background
Some of the confusion comes from the rush to treat every Supreme Court ruling as a clear win or loss. In this case, the justices ruled on a technicality and left room for the challengers to revise their argument.
The legal fight makes more sense when viewed in two stages.
Stage 1: After Trump signed the executive order, the response was immediate. Advocacy groups, 23 states, and Washington, D.C., sued. They argued the president was reaching into an area of election administration constitutionally delegated to states and Congress. In June, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani of Massachusetts blocked the policy from taking effect, concluding the challengers were likely to succeed.
Then, on Aug. 24, the Supreme Court lifted that block. But the justices did not decide whether Trump’s policy was legal. The ruling explicitly said it should not be read as endorsing or rejecting the president’s authority. Instead, the Court said the states had moved too soon by challenging the executive order before USPS had finalized the rule for carrying it out. In other words, they needed to challenge an actual rule, not what USPS might eventually do.
Stage 2: By then, USPS had finalized its rule, creating a new federal clearance process before mail ballots could go out. According to the new rule, state and local election officials would have to enroll mail voters in a federal portal, and both outgoing and return envelopes would be required to have unique barcodes tied to each voter and mailing address. USPS also reaffirmed that noncompliant ballot batches could be sent back to election officials for correction.
The states and advocacy groups quickly filed a new lawsuit targeting the now-finalized regulations, rather than the executive order. Judge Talwani issued a temporary restraining order on Aug. 27 and converted it into a nationwide preliminary injunction on Sept. 4.
Aside from the cases before Judge Talwani in the First Circuit, challenges brought by the Democratic Party, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and the NAACP have been consolidated into one case moving through the D.C. Circuit. The NAACP is also pursuing a separate challenge involving the Postal Service.
As for Utah, it has stayed out of the litigation, but it is currently under the umbrella of the injunction obtained by the states that did sue. If that nationwide protection disappears, Utah has no separate court order shielding its mail-ballot system.
The Trump administration appears intent on putting the new requirements in place before November. The legal fight is still moving quickly, and it is now up to the Supreme Court. The First Circuit rejected the administration‘s appeal on Sept. 10, and the administration filed a new emergency request with the justices the same day. A ruling could come at any time.
Will Utah voters be able to vote by mail this fall?
Utah has relied on vote-by-mail for more than a decade, and in 2019, it became the default statewide. The state now sends ballots to roughly 1.8 million active voters through the U.S. Postal Service. This year, the first ballots are scheduled to go out Sept. 18 to military and overseas voters, followed by the broader statewide mailing on Oct. 13.
The courts are unlikely to settle the broader legal question in the next few weeks, especially with several overlapping lawsuits challenging different pieces of the administration’s mail-voting push. But the USPS rule could still be allowed to take effect temporarily while those cases continue.
If that happens before November, what would it mean for Utah’s vote-by-mail system?
Scenario 1: Nothing is decided before the election
The USPS rule remains tied up in court through November, and Utah proceeds under its existing vote-by-mail system. Ballots go out on schedule while the larger constitutional fight continues after Election Day.
For Utah voters, November would look largely familiar — but not exactly the same.
Active registered voters would still automatically receive ballots and could return them by mail, drop box, or in person. But HB 300, passed by the Utah Legislature in 2025, has already changed some of the state’s rules for mail-in voting. Ballots must now arrive by 8 p.m. on Election Day. A postmark is no longer enough. Voters also must provide the last four digits of a Utah driver license, state ID number, or social security number on the return envelope.
Beginning in 2029, HB 300 will end automatic ballot mailing and move Utah to an opt-in system.
Scenario 2: The rule survives, but not for this election
The Court could conclude that some or all of the USPS rule is lawful but still decide it is too late to impose it for the 2026 election. Supreme Court precedent generally disfavors last-minute changes to election procedures when voting is already underway or close to beginning.
In that case, Utah would still use its current system this fall, but election officials could be required to adopt the new federal requirements for a future election. Voters likely would not notice any change in November — aside from changes Utah already made under HB 300 — despite the Trump administration having won an important legal victory.
Scenario 3: The rule takes effect before Utah’s ballots go out
If the USPS rule takes effect, Utah and county election officials would have a matter of weeks to comply with the new requirements before mailing ballots.
Some of that infrastructure is already in place. Utah uses ballot tracking, unique identifiers, and standardized election-mail envelopes. The new piece would be the federal layer, including enrolling Utah’s 1.8 million mail voters in a USPS portal and clearing outgoing ballot batches through the agency’s system.
That is where the practical concerns become more significant. Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson warned in August that if the courts allow the USPS to implement the rule this year, it would be “an unmitigated disaster.”
USPS is not simply asking states to adjust an existing process or sign onto an established platform. It is rolling out a new nationwide system that would serve as a gatekeeper for roughly a third of the country’s voters.
Under the rule, access to the mail itself depends on the system working.
And as of early September, USPS was still finalizing the portal, saying only that it expected to make it available sometime during the week of Sept. 7. Even if the system comes online by that deadline, election officials would have only weeks to learn it, test it, and work it into ballot-mailing procedures already underway. Jurisdictions that fail to complete those steps could see USPS refuse to accept their ballot mail.
The Postal Service says it expects rejection rates to be low and that states will have flexibility in how they comply. But a whistleblower’s account raises questions about how smoothly that flexibility would work in practice, particularly when technical errors inevitably occur in a new system.
According to a disclosure sent to Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., USPS adopted what the whistleblower described as a “zero percent failure rate” for ballot batches. If even one ballot in a batch of 10,000 can’t be verified — because a barcode fails to scan or the information doesn’t match USPS records — the whistleblower says the entire batch could be rejected and returned to election officials to resolve the problem.
In Utah, even relatively short delays could have consequences. The state’s new Election Day receipt deadline means time lost getting ballots into voters’ hands is also time lost for voters to fill them out and get them back. USPS itself recommends that voters mail completed ballots at least a week before their state’s deadline.
The worst-case scenario? Hundreds — possibly thousands — of voters do everything right, but their ballots still return too late to count because the delay happened before the ballot ever reached them.
Scenario 4: The rule takes effect after voting has begun
Scenario 3 assumes Utah gets at least a short window to adapt before ballots go out. Scenario 4 is what happens if that window disappears. It is by far the messiest scenario.
If the courts allow USPS to enforce the rule after some ballots are already in circulation, election officials could be forced to change procedures in the middle of the election. Ballots mailed before the change could move under the old system, while later batches might have to clear the new federal portal and verification requirements.
This could create two tracks for the same election. Some voters might receive ballots on schedule while others face delays tied to the new system. Election officials would also have to determine how the new requirements apply to replacement ballots, ballots for newly registered voters, and other mailings sent after the rule takes effect.
The legal questions would not necessarily end there.
Voters in the same election could end up playing by different rules depending on when their ballots entered the mail. If the race is close enough that those affected ballots could change the outcome, the fight could become a post-election battle over which ballots count.
Below are the arguments from critics and supporters of the new USPS mail-in ballot rules, followed by senior writer & editor Erica Royer’s take.
What opponents of the USPS rule are saying
The Supreme Court’s ruling could create confusion and uncertainty as the midterms approach.
Utah’s existing election process should be protected while the legal fight continues.
The new USPS ballot-mail system may not be ready or reliable enough to implement before the election.
In response to the Aug. 24 Supreme Court ruling, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented sharply, warning that the Court’s decision would create confusion for states and voters as the midterm elections approach.
“This ruling violates well-established precedents concerning this Court’s equitable discretion and needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections. It also lets another shoe drop in the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating for certain plaintiffs who seek to bring election-related challenges. The Court has held for a while now that even valid election-related legal claims can come too late. Today’s revelation is that such claims can also come too early — never mind that an election is looming and related harms are presently occurring. Never mind, too, that the Government (which controls the timing of proposed and final rules) can easily game the system. . . .
“States administering elections and the voting public that relies on them to do so deserve clarity, not caginess or confusion. . . .
“The President does not have any legal authority to require that elections be conducted in accordance with his preferences, or to withhold delivery of mail-in ballots that are not formatted consistent with the President’s wishes.”
In addition to her warning of an “unmitigated disaster if the injunction is lifted,” Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, Utah’s top election official, has promised to protect Utah voters and Utah’s election system.
Following the Supreme Court’s Aug. 24 decision: “Today’s SCOTUS decision has no effect on Utah. A nationwide injunction against the USPS mail ballot rule stemming from a different lawsuit remains in place for now. We expect an updated ruling in that lawsuit on Wednesday (Aug. 26).
“In the meantime, Attorney General Brown and I are in close communication as his office works through all our legal options. I assure all Utah voters that they will be defended. We will run a secure election in accordance with state and federal law.”
After the temporary restraining order was issued, Henderson told the Deseret News that she believes the USPS ballot rule is unconstitutional and again emphasized that Utah officials intend to protect the state’s existing election process:
“This temporary restraining order gives our state and county election officials the ability to move forward with the 2026 midterm elections as planned. We will continue to closely watch the legal developments and work with Attorney General Derek Brown to ensure that Utah’s election will be administered according to state and federal law.”
In a letter to Postmaster General David Steiner, Sen. Richard Blumenthal detailed the USPS whistleblower’s allegations and raised questions about whether the new portal would be ready and reliable enough for states to use.
“The whistleblower’s allegations make clear that USPS lacks the technical or operational capability needed to effectively implement the EO’s provisions in a way that safeguards every citizen’s right to vote in the upcoming midterm elections. Despite this, the Trump Administration appears intent on USPS moving forward with its flawed plans, no matter the chaos they may create. . . .
“Each of these problems: rushed development; a zero percent failure rate; and poor management are cause for concern on their own. Taken together they present a clear picture of a fatally flawed process that cannot and will not protect American voters. Put plainly: This process will likely lead to chaos, confusion, and the inability of many Americans to have their vote counted.”
What supporters of the USPS rule are saying
Tightening election regulation is necessary to make voting secure and harder to manipulate.
States cannot secure federal elections on their own because vulnerabilities in one state can affect voters nationwide.
The new USPS requirements are commonsense safeguards for mail ballots and voter eligibility.
Utah Sen. Mike Lee has broadly supported efforts to tighten election rules, from Utah’s HB 300 and the SAVE Act to the Trump administration’s new USPS mail-ballot requirements.
On July 20, while promoting the SAVE Act on the Senate floor, Lee argued that requiring identification is justified precisely because voting is a fundamental right.
“The mere fact that we have a lot of people who are allowed to vote doesn’t diminish the seriousness of not requiring people to prove that they are in fact who they claim to be when they show up to exercise that important right. Some people, when denying that there’s any need for us to act here, will throw out things and say, well that’s fine for the bank or for theater tickets or for the pharmacy, but this is an important constitutional right. It is a fundamental right. My response to that is, Yes! Exactly! And that’s exactly why we need it. The fact that it involves an important fundamental constitutional right is a reason why we need to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.”
Lee has made a similar argument closer to home. In 2025, he endorsed Utah’s HB 300 as an opportunity for the state to set an example on election security.
“Utah is one of the reddest states in the nation. We should be a leader in election security,” Lee posted on X. “I wholeheartedly support Utah House Speaker (Mike) Schultz in his effort to ensure that every vote is valid and that (our) ballots are secure.”
That same emphasis on election security has shaped Lee’s response to the current fight over the Trump administration’s executive order.
“The Supreme Court has delivered a national victory for election integrity,” Lee said in a statement after the Court’s Aug. 24 decision. “They recognize that President Trump can fight to ensure accountability for mail-in voting, and that American elections should be determined only by American citizens.”
After Judge Indira Talwani later blocked the Postal Service’s final rule, Lee’s response was much shorter.
“Impeach Judge Talwani.”
In a July 6 letter to USPS, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, writing on behalf of 13 states, argued that preventing voter fraud requires more than a state-by-state approach.
“States are the leaders in regulating elections, and yet despite our best efforts to enact policies to deter and detect fraud, voter fraud continues to be a problem. We appreciate the federal government lending a helping hand to shore up our elections and help states provide Americans with confidence in our system,” Marshall wrote. “Let’s be clear, we run our elections well in Alabama, but this is still happening right here in our state, with multiple documented cases of absentee ballot fraud just in the past year. And while we in Alabama can do all we can to secure our elections, Alabamians deserve to know that national elections held in other states are also secure since they affect us as well.”
White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis called the Aug. 24 Supreme Court ruling a “major win” for election security.
“The Supreme Court ruling was a major win for the security of American elections. Radical Democrats continue to oppose commonsense measures that protect the security of mail-in ballots and ensure only Americans are electing American leaders. The Trump administration will continue to lawfully enact the agenda President Trump was elected on, which includes the safety and security of our elections.”
My take
The Supreme Court is unlikely to let the USPS rule take effect this election cycle.
The administration faces an uphill battle proving the rule is constitutional.
If the Court applies its recent limits on executive power consistently, the challengers are likely to prevail.
I love voting by mail in Utah. I honestly can’t remember the last time I voted in person. There is something wonderfully practical about sitting at my kitchen table with my ballot, looking up candidates and issues as I go, and making decisions with the information in front of me instead of trying to remember everything once I’m standing in a voting booth.
For all the legal drama surrounding the new USPS rule, though, I doubt it will meaningfully change how Utahns vote this November.
North Carolina began sending absentee ballots on Sept. 4, meaning the federal election is already underway. Utah’s first ballots go out next week. Changing election requirements after voting begins risks confusion. Justice Jackson has said so. States have said so. And the administration is still asking the Supreme Court to change them anyway.
It has repeatedly described the new USPS requirements as “modest” and argued that concerns about disruption are overblown. In fact, in its Supreme Court filing, the administration says the injunction itself risks “sowing confusion and chaos” by making preparations voluntary and leaving states unsure whether they ultimately will have to comply.
I have a hard time reconciling that with the scale and timing of what the Postal Service is actually trying to do. The agency is standing up a new national system on a compressed timeline, while ballots are already going out and a whistleblower has raised questions about whether the portal was adequately tested.
Maybe it will work exactly as intended. But asking every state to rely on it this late in the process is still a serious operational gamble, and calling the changes modest does not make that risk disappear.
That is also why I do not expect the Supreme Court to let the rule take effect in this election cycle. The Court has repeatedly warned against changing election procedures close to an election, particularly when the change would be complicated or disruptive to implement.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh put it plainly in Merrill v. Milligan (2022): “When an election is close at hand, the rules of the road must be clear and settled.” Here, ballots are already going out, states are warning of major operational problems, and the administration is asking the Court to introduce a new nationwide system while the underlying legal authority remains seriously contested.
In my view, that is too much practical risk for an emergency order, especially when I also think the administration faces a difficult path to ultimately proving the rule is lawful.
On the constitutional question, the administration is on much shakier ground. The Court’s conservative majority is why I expect the challengers to ultimately prevail.
Despite the Aug. 24 ruling that seemed to favor the Trump administration, the Court’s conservative justices have spent years insisting that constitutional text matters. Again and again, they have said that power stays where the Constitution puts it and that agencies cannot turn broad statutory language into authority Congress never clearly gave them.
The administration’s answer is that the Postal Service is not regulating elections at all. It says the rule simply regulates the use of the federal mail: envelope design, address information, and other preparation requirements for ballots sent through USPS. States, it argues, still decide who is eligible to vote, when ballots are due, and how votes are counted.
Congress did give USPS broad authority over the collection, handling, transportation, delivery, return, and holding of mail, along with the power to issue regulations necessary to carry out its statutory functions and responsibility for maintaining an efficient nationwide mail system. The administration argues that the new ballot requirements fit comfortably within those powers.
That framing matters because it sets up the real constitutional fight. If this is simply a postal rule that happens to apply to ballots, the administration has a much stronger case. If it effectively dictates how states must administer federal elections in order for their ballots to move through the mail, then the Elections Clause and the Court’s recent limits on agency power become much harder to avoid.
In West Virginia v. EPA (2022), the Court rejected the EPA’s attempt to use a relatively obscure provision of the Clean Air Act to reshape how electricity was generated across the country. The majority said agencies need “clear congressional authorization” before claiming powers of major economic and political significance. The problem was not simply that EPA had adopted an ambitious policy. It was that the agency was using broad statutory language to claim a kind of authority Congress had never clearly handed it.
The Court applied much the same reasoning in Biden v. Nebraska (2023), striking down the administration’s student-loan forgiveness program. Again, the majority focused on the gap between the statute Congress actually passed and the enormous power the executive branch claimed it allowed. The Court concluded that a program with such broad economic and political consequences required clear congressional authorization, and that the HEROES Act did not provide it.
Then came Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024), where the Court went further and ended Chevron deference. Instead of deferring to an agency when a statute is ambiguous, courts must now exercise their own independent judgment about what Congress actually authorized. That decision matters here because USPS cannot simply point to broad authority over the mail and ask courts to defer to its interpretation of how far that authority reaches. The judiciary itself must decide whether Congress actually gave USPS the power it is claiming.
At the same time, this Court has upheld executive action when it was tied more closely to authority Congress had clearly delegated or to powers the Constitution gives the president directly. In Trump v. United States (2024), for example, the Court recognized broad presidential immunity for official acts, reasoning that the president’s constitutional role requires protection from criminal prosecution for core official conduct. In Biden v. Missouri (2022), the Court allowed a vaccine requirement for healthcare workers because Congress had given the relevant agency authority over facilities participating in Medicare and Medicaid, and the rule was closely connected to patient safety. And in Trump v. Hawaii (2018), the Court upheld the travel proclamation because Congress had granted the president broad authority over the entry of noncitizens and the proclamation fell within that delegated power.
Those cases are different from the USPS dispute in important ways. They involved either presidential authority the Constitution itself recognizes or statutory authority Congress had granted in fairly direct terms. Here, the administration is making a more unusual argument: That general authority to operate the mail allows the executive branch to impose detailed requirements on how states administer federal elections.
It stretches the statute far beyond what Congress clearly authorized.
And unlike the healthcare and immigration cases, this claim runs directly into another part of the Constitution. The Elections Clause gives states the primary responsibility for regulating the time, place, and manner of federal elections and gives Congress the power to alter those rules. It does not give the president an independent election power.
The Court took that allocation seriously in Moore v. Harper (2023). Although that case dealt with the limits on state legislatures rather than presidential power, the majority emphasized that the Elections Clause expressly vests election-regulating authority in state legislatures and that courts must respect the constitutional boundaries surrounding that power.
USPS unquestionably has broad authority to run the mail. But telling states how ballot envelopes must be designed, what voter information they must submit, and under what circumstances ballot mail can be rejected starts to look a lot less like postal administration and a lot more like election regulation. The constitutional question is whether Congress actually authorized USPS to cross that line.
That is why the Court’s recent cases cut both ways for the administration. This majority has been willing to uphold robust executive power when the Constitution or Congress clearly supplies it. But it has also been unusually skeptical when an agency takes broadly worded authority and turns it into something much larger.
The USPS case asks the justices to decide which category this belongs in.
If they apply the same separation-of-powers and statutory-authority principles they have emphasized in these other cases, the challengers have a substantial argument that regulating the mail is one thing — regulating the election through the mail is another.
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The sharpest reader responses may end up in a future article.
