BOSTON – For the millions of Americans who vote by mail in 22 states, a federal court ruling handed down Thursday arrived as a concrete assurance ahead of November: their ballots will reach them regardless of whether the Trump administration’s federal voter list gets built in time.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston blocked the central provisions of President Trump’s March 2026 executive order on mail voting, ruling that his directives to the Department of Homeland Security and the United States Postal Service “unconstitutionally violate the separation of powers.” The ruling covers 22 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia, which had filed a joint lawsuit seeking to halt the order before it reshaped the midterm election.
The executive order directed two things. First, it instructed DHS to construct a federal list of eligible voters drawn from citizenship records and federal databases. Second, it required USPS to refuse delivery of mail-in ballots in states that declined to hand over their voter rolls to the administration. Under the system Trump envisioned, states unwilling to share that data would effectively see their residents cut off from mail-in voting for federal elections, a mechanism that critics called an unprecedented federal intrusion into a process the Constitution assigns to the states.
What made Thursday’s ruling more than symbolic was how far the Postal Service had already moved. USPS had published a proposed rule in the Federal Register to begin implementing Trump’s directive, signaling the administration’s intent to have its voter list system operational ahead of November. Talwani blocked that proposed rule as well, the most concrete stoppage yet of the administration’s election overhaul machinery.
Her constitutional reasoning was direct. “No law enacted by Congress delegates authority to control mail-in voting to USPS,” she wrote. The Constitution assigns the authority to set the rules for federal elections to state legislatures and to Congress, and Talwani found no plausible reading of existing law that gave the president authority to override that arrangement. “The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections.”
Talwani’s ruling is the fourth order to strike down Trump’s March executive action. Three earlier decisions, including one from a federal judge in New York in May, had blocked parts of the order in narrower contexts or different jurisdictions. The accumulation suggests the administration’s constitutional arguments have not found traction in court, though the executive branch has consistently appealed and the litigation is far from settled.
The legal picture is complicated by a contrary ruling. In May, a federal judge in Washington, D.C. declined to block the executive order when a different set of plaintiffs challenged it, creating a split that is likely to require resolution at the appellate level or by the Supreme Court. With the November elections drawing closer, the timeline for that resolution grows shorter.
The SAVE America Act, Trump’s legislative vehicle for similar provisions including proof-of-citizenship requirements and restrictions on mail voting, remains stalled in the Senate. Senate Democrats have held firm against it, deploying election observers and blocking floor votes. Trump made clear last week the stall frustrates him: he canceled a scheduled signing ceremony for a bipartisan housing bill, telling Republicans he would not move on that legislation until the Senate advances the SAVE Act.
His executive order was, in the legal sense, a unilateral workaround. After the SAVE Act bogged down in Congress, he signed the March order to move on the same terrain by presidential directive. Talwani’s ruling treats that as constitutionally impermissible, a line the judge found crossed not because the policy is necessarily wrong but because the president does not have the constitutional authority to draw it.
Trump and his allies have long alleged, without credible evidence, that mail-in voting is vulnerable to widespread fraud. Multiple audits, including those run by Republican officials in contested states, found no evidence of systemic fraud in 2020 or 2022 elections. Every state’s vote was certified, and dozens of courts, including some with Trump-appointed judges, dismissed challenges alleging irregularities.
The 22 states covered by Thursday’s ruling include Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, along with Washington, D.C.
The Trump administration is expected to appeal Talwani’s ruling, CNN reported. What happens at the circuit court level, and whether judges try to reconcile the Boston and D.C. outcomes, remains open. With some states already preparing November ballots, the timeline for appellate resolution is compressed, and the practical stakes for election administrators grow with each passing day.
