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Even with voting already underway, uncertainty about what might come next had been hovering over preparations for this year’s midterm elections.
The U.S. Supreme Court lifted much of that uncertainty late Monday when it rejected President Donald Trump’s push to have the U.S. Postal Service play a central role in deciding who would be able to receive a mail ballot.
The decision is a win for the status quo. The thousands of election offices around the country can send out mail ballots as they had intended without worrying about complying with new Postal Service rules imposed at the 11th hour.
“Now, we can finally move forward and get back to what we do best: conducting our elections without a dark cloud hanging over us — fairly, openly, for the people, by the people,” California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a Democrat who oversees voting in a state where all voters receive a mail ballot, said in a statement after the decision.
Executive order and ongoing litigation had created confusion
The case before the court stemmed from an executive order Trump signed in March.
The administration developed a plan that would require states to adopt a uniform envelope style for mailed ballots and submit lists of eligible voters to an online portal it was developing. The Postal Service could refuse to deliver ballots to states that didn’t comply.
A whistleblower report said the postal system’s requirements could lead to millions of mail ballots never being sent, disenfranchising many of the country’s voters during an election that will decide control of Congress during the final two years of Trump’s term.
A tangle of legal challenges, rapid-fire rulings and appeals left election officials uncertain about what rules would ultimately be in place. But they agreed on one thing: Introducing such massive changes so close to a general election would be chaotic and nearly impossible to pull off in a country where roughly a third of voters use mail ballots.
The Supreme Court’s decision comes as mail voting is already in progress in some states. Some election officials have said they were worried that the dispute, coming late in the election cycle, would leave voters confused about what’s allowed.
Voting rights advocates and state election officials moved swiftly after Monday’s decision to make clear that elections will function as they always have in each state.
“Utahns can have confidence that the 2026 election will proceed as normal,” said Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican serving as the state’s chief election officer.
The uncertainty was most pressing in the states that rely on mail voting
The concern was particularly acute in the eight states where voters cast ballots almost entirely by mail: California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Washington.
They had faced the daunting challenge of adapting in short order without an extensive network of polling places.
“This is a victory for Oregonians, the right to vote, and the rule of law,” said Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read, a Democrat. “This provides voters and elections officials with the certainty they need ahead of a major, federal election, and it sends a clear message to this country: Presidents don’t run elections, the people do.”
Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar said his reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision is “one of relief, but also excitement, because today the voters really won across America.”
In Nevada’s June primary, more than half of voters cast ballots by mail. It’s a state where mail voting is “critical” to voter voices being heard, Aguilar said.
But the Democrat said “some of the damage has already been done,” with false claims about mail ballots affecting people’s confidence in the voting method.
“You can trust the process,” Aguilar urged voters. “Please participate.”
What about future elections?
Lower courts had blocked the Trump administration from implementing its rules. The Supreme Court rejected the its attempt to stay those decisions, even as three justices — Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas — expressed various levels of willingness to let Trump carry out his plan in current or future elections.
Yet a majority of the justices noted in the decision that the administration was “unlikely to succeed on the merits” in defending its plan. It was heartening to some voting rights experts to see that language inserted.
“The court didn’t have to explain that it was disinclined to side with the government on the merits, but it did that, and that is a sign for the future,” said Derek Muller, a Notre Dame law professor.
David Becker, a former U.S. Justice Department lawyer who is now executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, said implementing Trump’s executive order “would have done nothing for election integrity but would have imposed a vast and expensive new bureaucracy on the states” and disenfranchised voters.
He said the majority’s language about the merits of the case meant “it is unlikely these rules will ever apply to any election.”
He added, “Thanks to the rule of law, voters will not need to worry about this.”
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Associated Press writers Sophie Austin in Sacramento, California, Nicholas Riccardi in Mason, Michigan, Ali Swenson in New York, Lindsay Whitehurst in Washington, D.C., and Wufei Yu in Phoenix contributed to this report.
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