WASHINGTON — The envelopes went out in North Carolina this week, each one carrying a general election ballot for the November 3 midterm. North Carolina became the first state to begin mailing ballots in the 2026 cycle, and those envelopes were assembled under state rules, not federal ones, because for the third time in less than three weeks a court has kept the Trump administration from telling the Postal Service how to handle them.
A three-judge panel of the 1st United States Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the preliminary injunction blocking the USPS’s new mail ballot regulation on Friday, the latest in a sequence of rulings that has left the federal government’s most aggressive attempt to reshape mail voting before a national election effectively stopped in the courts. According to NBC News, the Department of Justice filed its third emergency application to the Supreme Court on Friday, asking the justices to intervene and allow the postal rules to take effect immediately, before the mail ballot window closes for the rest of the country.
How the Supreme Court answers that question will determine whether the Trump administration’s yearlong effort to restrict mail voting leaves a mark on the 2026 elections before November 3.
The effort began with Executive Order 14399, signed in January. It directed the U.S. Postal Service, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Justice Department to take steps toward limiting which voters could receive mail ballots and what designs those ballots could use.
Federal courts in Massachusetts and elsewhere blocked nearly all of the initiative. But on August 24, in a 6–3 ruling, the Supreme Court lifted injunctions against several provisions. The decision allowed DHS to compile a federal citizenship database, authorized the Justice Department to prioritize prosecutions of state officials who issue ballots to ineligible voters, and permitted the USPS to continue its rulemaking process.
The USPS moved quickly. Within weeks it issued a final rule specifying uniform ballot envelope sizes, required security features, and postmark requirements that states would need to meet for the Postal Service to process their mail ballots. The rule was set to take effect immediately.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani blocked it on September 4, NBC News reported. “The immediate implementation of the Final Rule issued less than seventy days before the November 2026 election threatens disenfranchisement of millions of United States citizens who seek to vote by mail,” she wrote. What the August 24 ruling had authorized was rulemaking, not the immediate imposition of rules on states that had already spent months preparing their ballot materials.
North Carolina sent its first ballots this week. Montana begins in mid-September. Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, four of the most competitive states in the Senate and House battlegrounds, all begin mail ballot distribution within the next three weeks. Whether the Court will act quickly enough to affect any of those states is unclear. The Court’s emergency docket moves fast when the justices choose to move it, and the administration’s application explicitly cites the closing window as justification for speed.
A third application to the same Court on the same legal question invites a harder look at both the underlying merits and the administration’s own contribution to the time pressure. In her August dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, drew a sharp line around what the August 24 ruling did not resolve. “Today’s decision does not address whether the President’s attempts to interfere with States’ administration of the November 2026 elections are lawful,” she wrote. The constitutional questions, whether the president has the authority to direct postal rules for state-run elections at all, remain unanswered.
Democrats have argued throughout this litigation that mail voting restrictions fall disproportionately on elderly, low-income, and disabled voters who rely on absentee ballots not as a preference but as their only practical means of participation. Republicans have contested that framing, describing the USPS regulation as a fraud-prevention measure standardizing postal processing across the country.
The litigation’s outcome matters most in the states where the margins will be closest. In Ohio, where the Senate race sits in a statistical dead heat with fifty days left, both campaigns are watching the postal fight the way campaigns watch weather forecasts: unable to change it, unable to stop monitoring it. Ballots in Ohio are scheduled to go out in the first week of October. If the USPS rule takes effect before then, state election officials face the immediate compliance question that drove the original injunction: standards imposed less than seventy days before an election, after ballot materials were already ordered. Republicans are trailing Democrats by six points in the generic ballot, the worst second-term position for a party in power since 2005.
Whether the Supreme Court will rule before any of those state windows open, whether any ruling would apply retroactively to ballots already sent, and whether the constitutional question Sotomayor identified ever gets a direct answer are the questions this litigation has not yet reached. A ruling could come this week, or it could come after millions of ballots are already in the mail.
