Overview
- The Supreme Court left lower-court injunctions in place on Monday, preventing the Postal Service from enforcing its new mail‑ballot rule before the November midterms and allowing states to keep current ballot procedures.
- The contested rule would have forced states to upload lists of mail‑ballot recipients to a USPS portal, use uniform envelopes with unique barcodes, and let the Postal Service refuse ballots that did not meet its standards.
- The court said the administration is unlikely to win on the merits, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that the rule might fall within USPS authority but cannot be applied this year because officials lack time to implement it, and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.
- Election officials and a USPS whistleblower warned the portal and barcode system was not ready and that a single barcode error could cause whole batches of ballots to be discarded, while several states had already begun mailing ballots, making a rapid overhaul impractical.
- The ruling preserves the status quo for voters but leaves open a larger legal fight over federal authority versus state control of elections that could return to the courts after the midterms and carry major partisan consequences.