BOSTON – In Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – the four states that together determined the last two presidential contests – voters who rely on absentee ballots will not face a new federal approval list before their next envelope reaches the mail. A federal court in Boston ruled Thursday that no such list can lawfully exist, delivering the sharpest judicial rebuke yet of the Trump administration’s effort to insert the executive branch into the machinery of American elections.
Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts blocked the two central pillars of an executive order Trump signed in March: a directive to build a federally controlled registry of adult U.S. citizens, and a requirement that the Postal Service deliver mail ballots only to voters whose names appeared on that registry. The injunction covers 23 states and the District of Columbia – a coalition that filed suit to stop the order – and applies to a population that accounts for nearly half the country’s eligible voters.
Talwani, in a 37-page opinion, was unequivocal. The Constitution “does not grant the President any specific powers over elections” and “reserves the power to determine voter eligibility to the States alone,” she wrote. The executive order violated both of those limits at once.
The order, formally titled Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections, directed the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to build a centralized database of citizens eligible to cast ballots in federal elections. Once built, that database was to become the gating mechanism for the U.S. Postal Service: states that refused to hand over their voter rolls to federal agencies would see their residents’ mail ballots left undelivered.
Talwani found the federal government had no legal authority for either step. Presidential power over federal elections flows from Article I of the Constitution – but Article I grants that power to Congress, not the White House. The postal component carried its own flaw. NPR reported that Talwani wrote “No law enacted by Congress delegates authority to control mail-in voting to USPS” – a finding that simultaneously blocked a separate USPS implementation plan the order had set in motion.
The stakes for November are real. Roughly one in four votes cast in recent federal elections has arrived by mail, a proportion sustained across both 2022 and 2024 after expanding sharply during the pandemic cycle. Among the 24 affected jurisdictions are states where Senate and House races are expected to be decided by thin margins. A federal filter inserted between a ballot and its intended destination – applied only to voters whose names the government’s registry could not confirm – carried no clear mechanism to remedy an erroneous exclusion before Election Day.
Among the states now protected by the injunction: Arizona, which has swung between the two parties in three of the past four presidential cycles; Nevada and North Carolina, both closely contested in 2024; and Wisconsin, whose Senate seat is among the most competitive races in November’s midterms.
The ruling creates a split across the federal judiciary. NBC News reported that a judge in Washington, D.C., declined in May to block the same executive order in a separate lawsuit, leaving two district courts with conflicting constitutional assessments of the same policy. That split makes an appellate ruling effectively inevitable. The Trump administration is expected to challenge Talwani’s decision before the First Circuit Court of Appeals, though no timeline has been announced. Should the First Circuit uphold the injunction, the administration’s remaining avenue would be the Supreme Court – which has not previously addressed whether a president can direct USPS to condition ballot delivery on residency in a federal registry.
Thursday’s ruling is the third time this year a federal judge has blocked a Trump executive action touching directly on election mechanics. A separate order requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration was blocked permanently by a different court earlier in June. A third, which sought to use immigration enforcement databases to audit state voter rolls, was halted on the eve of its planned implementation. None of the three orders were enacted through Congress. CNN noted that the consistent pattern – executive decree followed by judicial block – has frustrated even Republican election attorneys who supported the underlying policy goals.
That procedural choice – executive order rather than legislation – has been the point of constitutional exposure in each case. Whether Congress could pass the same policies through statute, and whether it would, is a question the Republican-controlled legislature has not moved to test. A Congress that has concentrated its bipartisan institutional energy on questions like the sanctions framework for Chinese artificial intelligence development has invested comparatively little legislative effort in the legal architecture of election administration this session.
What no court has yet settled is the deeper constitutional question: whether the federal government possesses any authority to build a centralized voter verification system, regardless of whether the instruction comes from the executive branch or the legislature. Talwani’s ruling addresses presidential power. It does not address congressional power. That distinction may matter before this case ends.
