The judicial back-and-forth over mail-in voting continues in the United States. Just one day after a judge removed the last obstacle preventing President Donald Trump from limiting absentee voting, the same judge has blocked it again. The presidential decree signed in March that sets strict requirements for exercising the right to vote by mail has gone from being paused by two court rulings, reinstated by the Supreme Court, pushed again in the courts, and once more halted within a matter of days. The cascade of decisions that cancel each other out threatens to confuse voters with just over two months left until the midterm elections (midterms).
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The Boston district court judge extended the plan for a 14-day period, following a new wave of lawsuits filed just days before mail-in ballots begin to be sent out for the midterms. “Most of the plaintiff States have already requested their mail-in ballots, and some are required by state law to send them to eligible voters as early as next week,” she noted.
The legal battle the Administration is waging against Democratic States and other organizations has significant repercussions for the elections in which all 435 members of the House of Representatives, one-third of the Senate, and the governors of 39 States and territories are chosen. Nearly one-third of Americans vote by mail, and election officials maintain that there is not enough time to modify their systems and comply with the new Postal Service (USPS) guidelines.
The new rules, published last Friday, require the use of special envelopes with trackable barcodes for sending mail-in votes. Additionally, States would be required to provide the USPS with a list of eligible absentee voters, among other requirements. The aim is to reduce the number of voters exercising their right to participate in the democratic process via this method. Trump claims without evidence that absentee voting is fraudulent and a cause, already debunked, of the Republican losing the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden. A Brookings Institution report published in 2025 revealed that mail-in voting fraud occurred in only about four cases per 10 million votes cast by that method.
“The plaintiff States do not have the time or funds to design new mail-in ballots, obtain approval for the new designs, commission production of those ballots, update their own election management systems, and train election officials to use the USPS portal and upload citizen data to it, all before the midterm elections,” Talwani wrote on Thursday. The judge justified her new ruling by understanding that the most recent lawsuit arose in a different context than the previous ones, as it was filed after the Administration defined the new rules last Friday.
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The case could return to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of Trump earlier this week. The High Court did not rule on the legality of the presidential decree but determined that the block imposed by Judge Talwani was premature. The Supreme Court, where six of its nine members are conservatives, has supported the Republican in numerous cases. The three progressive judges – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson – dissented.
In her Thursday decision, Talwani ruled on the lawsuit filed by two dozen Democratic States, which argued that “if not suspended or a preliminary injunction issued to prevent its application, the rule will frustrate or directly prevent the plaintiff States from administering their mail-in voting programs in November and, predictably, will deprive voters who vote by mail of their right to vote.” The attorneys general who signed the text pointed out that “this seems to be what the president prefers.”
Trump issued the executive order against mail-in voting in March. Lawsuits quickly followed, but the Administration argued that the claims were premature since the rules detailing how the order would be implemented had not yet been established. The Government won an initial case in Washington D.C. based on that argument. However, Judge Talwani issued injunctions to prevent the order’s application in the midterm elections in two separate cases she presided over in Boston. The Supreme Court decision overturned one of them, and the judge withdrew the other ruling last Wednesday.
The Hispanic rights advocacy organization UnidosUS criticized the Supreme Court decision, which affects millions of Latinos who, unable to take time off work, opt for mail-in voting. “Members of our Armed Forces stationed overseas depend on mail-in voting to participate in our democracy. The same goes for working-class Latino voters who cannot take time off work, lack reliable transportation, or have health issues that make in-person voting difficult. For all of them, access to mail-in ballots is not a mere convenience; it is essential,” it stated.
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