Overview
- U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani ruled Thursday that plaintiffs may pursue challenges that could affect the 2026 midterm elections and denied the administration’s request to throw out the lawsuits outright.
- The executive order directs Homeland Security, working with the Social Security Administration, to compile lists of verified eligible voters and seeks to bar the U.S. Postal Service from delivering absentee ballots to people not on those lists.
- The U.S. Postal Service has proposed rules that would ask states to supply voter names and unique tracking barcodes for mail‑in ballots, but the rulemaking and any agency implementation have been slowed by the ongoing litigation.
- Nearly two dozen states, Washington, D.C., and voting‑rights groups say the order is unconstitutional, intrudes on state control of elections, would be costly to implement, and risks confusing or disenfranchising voters who use mail ballots.
- The administration defends the measures as election security and has threatened to withhold funds from noncompliant jurisdictions, while a separate federal judge in Washington declined earlier to block the order and that decision is being appealed.