Supreme Court lifts injunction blocking Trump mail-in voting executive order, allowing implementation to proceed ahead of midterms
The Supreme Court's conservative majority lifted an injunction that had blocked President Trump's executive order restricting mail-in voting in 23 states, allowing the administration to begin implementation ahead of the November midterm elections. The court ruled 6-3 on procedural grounds, finding that the states that sued lacked legal standing to challenge the order, without ruling on the order's underlying legality. The three liberal-leaning justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissented.
The Supreme Court's unsigned majority order lifted a Massachusetts district court injunction that Democratic-led states had secured to block Trump's executive order, titled "Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections." The order, signed in March, directs federal agencies to compile citizenship-based voter lists and instructs the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail-in ballots only to individuals appearing on those approved lists.
The court's majority held that the order's directives were internal commands to federal agencies rather than mandates on the states themselves, and therefore the states suffered no concrete harm giving them standing to sue. "It directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to take appropriate action to create and distribute State Citizenship Lists. This provision is an internal directive from the President to a subordinate. It imposes no obligations on the States," the court wrote. The majority also made explicit that its ruling did not address whether the order's implementation would be lawful: "The Court's disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful. On that score, time will tell."
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in dissent, wrote that the ruling "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." New York Attorney General Letitia James called the decision a "painful setback" but said it would "not be the final word," and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the order was aimed at making it "harder for Americans to vote." The Trump administration and the Justice Department said they would move to implement the order immediately following the ruling.