U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during a working session with G7 leaders and outreach partners on international investment partnerships at the G7 summit in Evian-les-Bains, France, June 16, 2026.
Donald Trump’s unconstitutional bid to turn the United States Postal Service into a weapon of voter suppression could determine the outcome of the midterm elections and the future of American democracy.
The president’s bid is now on the Supreme Court’s notorious shadow docket for a final showdown in two consolidated cases (U.S. Postal Service v. California and Trump v. League of Women Voters) that center on the final regulatory rule on mail-in voting that the Postal Service issued on Aug. 21. The rule — adopted in compliance with an executive order Trump promulgated in March to root out what he claims is fraudulent voting by noncitizens — requires state election officials to upload lists of mail-in voters’ names and addresses to an untested and secretly constructed USPS online portal and to redesign ballot envelopes to include bar codes that can be checked against the voter lists. If a state does not obtain envelope design approval, or does not upload voter information, the USPS will not deliver ballots to voters.
For now, the rule has been blocked in both cases by preliminary injunctions issued by Boston-based Federal District Court Judge Indira Talwani. If the Supreme Court stays the injunctions and allows the new rule to be implemented, the impact will be devastating, especially for Democrats.
Nearly 1 in 3 Americans voted by mail in 2024, including an estimated 37% of Democratic voters, but only 24% of Republicans. Five states — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington — hold elections almost entirely by mail. As the midterms approach, North Carolina has already begun mailing midterm ballots to some 260,000 voters. According to Democracy Docket, a host of others will follow suit in the coming weeks, including 5.1 million mailed ballots in Washington, 4 million in Colorado and 3.2 million in Arizona. Next month in California, election officials are slated to mail over 23 million ballots.
Nearly 1 in 3 Americans voted by mail in 2024.
Even if the Postal Service’s new rule were warranted to prevent fraud — and studies have repeatedly shown that voter fraud in the U.S. is extremely rare — the states do not have sufficient time to retool their ballot infrastructures to securely meet the rule’s demands and deadlines.
“With fewer than 60 days to go before the November election, there is not a shred of evidence that states could comply with it without disenfranchising voters who rely on mail ballots,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, in a statement to the media. “Put plainly, this administration is racing to the Supreme Court to demand the right to enforce a rule that has no purpose other than to create chaos, undermine election integrity, and rob eligible voters of their essential right to make their voices heard in our democracy.”
This is not the first time Trump’s new postal system rule has reached the Supreme Court. On Aug. 24, the six Republican sycophants on the high tribunal lifted earlier injunctions blocking the rule issued by Judge Talwani on procedural grounds, holding that the initial legal challenges to the rule were brought prematurely. Now that the rule has become final, that rationale no longer applies. This time, Chief Justice John Roberts and his GOP confederates will be forced to assess the rule’s legality.
As a matter of law, the issue is a true no-brainer. The Constitution’s “Elections Clause” (Article I, Section 4, Clause 1) gives states the authority to set the “times, places, and manner” of elections for House members and senators subject only to congressional oversight. Even under the strong version of the unitary executive theory that the Republican court majority has embraced, the president and the federal agencies under his control have no power to dictate how elections are run.
The new postal system rule also runs afoul of the statutory framework governing the USPS, which requires the agency to have as “its basic function the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people … [by means of] prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and … to all communities.”
In addition, the rule conflicts with the postal system’s history as an impartial institution operating in the national interest to support democracy. That history dates back to the colonial era when Benjamin Franklin and others worked to replace the primitive courier system controlled by the British crown with an integrated service designed to unite the 13 colonies. Those efforts paved the way for the formation of the legendary committees of correspondence and for the first official post office established by the Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation, with Franklin as the first postmaster general. The Postal Service was formally organized under the Constitution, which granted Congress the power “To establish Post Offices and post Roads.”
Sauer and his arguments deserve to be laughed straight out of court.
Unlike the founders, Trump sees the Postal Service as a vehicle to negate democracy and maintain his personal grip on power. In his first term in office, he tried to gut the service by backing Louis DeJoy, an obsequious campaign donor, to become postmaster general. Among other measures, DeJoy eliminated overtime pay for postal workers, banned late or additional trips to deliver mail and removed highly efficient mail-sorting machines from facilities throughout the country to impede mail-in voting. In May 2025, the Postal Service replaced DeJoy with another Trump loyalist, former FedEx board member David Steiner, who oversaw the adoption of the new mail-in voting rule.
In the Supreme Court, the administration is represented by Solicitor General D. John Sauer, who gained Trump’s favor defending him in Trump v. United States, the landmark 2024 case on presidential immunity. In his brief to the court on mail-in balloting, Sauer argues that “the Postal Service’s final rule imposes only modest envelope-design and addressee-information requirements for federal-election ballots sent via U.S. Mail,” and that claims of voter disenfranchisement are overblown.
Sauer has likened mail-in ballots to the mailing of cremated remains and replica explosives, which the Postal Service can strictly regulate under federal law. He has also cited the service’s authority to reject unstamped mail and heavy parcels with insufficient postage, an argument that has nothing to do with the blanket prohibitions the new rule would impose.
Sauer and his arguments deserve to be laughed straight out of court.
But this is the Supreme Court of John Roberts, who has devoted his career to destroying the Voting Rights Act and conferring near-total immunity from criminal prosecution on Donald Trump. It is also the court of Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority decision overturning Roe v. Wade, and Clarence Thomas, who has spent his career accepting unreported luxury vacations paid for by billionaire Republican donors. It is also the court of three Trump appointees — Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett “I Like Beer” Kavanaugh. As recent history confirms, no argument is too absurd for this junta to embrace as long as it furthers the interests of Trump and the MAGA movement.
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