A federal judge has blocked new mail-in ballot rules from the U.S. Postal Service that were ordered by Donald Trump after states and election officials warned that it would be “virtually impossible” to comply with changes that could spark chaos for voters in the middle of midterm elections.
The new rules, ordered by the president through an executive order, would require election officials to add unique barcodes to ballot envelopes and order states to upload lists of people who requested them, giving the nation’s postal agency expansive authority to decide who gets to vote in an unprecedented shakeup of election administration.
Massachusetts District Judge Indira Talwani issued a preliminary injunction on Friday evening that blocks the changes while a legal battle plays out. The Trump administration has already asked the Supreme Court for permission to push the changes through as the president faces another major obstacle in his attempts to centralize control of the nation’s elections.
But the administration is running out of time. Many states are already mailing out their first waves of ballots, and election officials have repeatedly warned that the changes could accidentally disenfranchise thousands of eligible voters without any recourse to make their ballots count.
Implementing new election rules “would be an extraordinary amount of work for local officials at any time,” Talwani wrote Friday. “But imposing these mandates on election officials at present poses greater difficulties than otherwise because election officials are actively administering elections,” she said.
In addition to the work of registering voters, maintaining voter rolls and running the nation’s elections in 10,000 jurisdictions, officials must now “somehow find the time and resources to comply” with Trump’s orders “in the middle of election season,” Talwani added.
“Having considered this series of hurdles for officials against the backdrop of an impending election, and mindful of the fact that any minor malfunction will result in the denial of mail ballots, the court concludes that disenfranchisement … regardless of residence, is practically inevitable,” she wrote.
The Department of Justice and USPS have argued that the changes are merely standardizing election mail, but election officials across the country have warned that the rules would give the agency unconstitutional authority to interfere in election administration.
The agency is “trying to impose an entirely new rule that neither Congress nor the states authorized, that the Constitution forbids, and that will lead to confusion, error, and mass disenfranchisement,” lawyers for plaintiffs, including states and voting rights advocates, said in a statement after a court hearing on Thursday.
“Every day matters: This rule is creating confusion and chaos and impeding vital voter engagement work,” they said. “The American people deserve to know that the safe, secure, and trusted mail voting systems they rely on will continue to function effectively, without unlawful interference from USPS.”
Friday’s order follows a dizzying series of developments surrounding Trump’s mail-in ballot order, including a bombshell whistleblower complaint warning against “secretive, rushed” and “chaotic” attempts to implement the plans.
The report outlined “potentially catastrophic problems” with the administration’s brand-new system, including a “zero-percent failure policy” that could reject tens of thousands of ballots at a time if any single mistake is made, including misread barcodes or inadvertent errors from postal workers.
Postal officials and IT specialists called it a “mess” and a “s*** show” that illegally defied initial court orders against putting the new ballot-tracking system in place, according to the report.
Members of Congress demanded the agency’s inspector general investigate the allegations, triggering a review that was also launched Friday.
“Donald Trump’s attempt to potentially interfere with our elections and oppress millions of ballots will be fought every step of the way. We will continue fighting to defend vote-by-mail for every single American,” Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said in a statement.
Last month, the Supreme Court allowed Trump’s executive order pushing for the new rules to stand, which then kicked off the legal battle over the rules themselves.
In their appeal to the nation’s high court on Thursday night, lawyers for the Trump administration called the rule change “plainly constitutional.”
“While the states have primary authority to regulate the manner of elections, they cannot choose to use the federal mails to carry out their elections but then insist that their election-related mail is somehow exempt from the Postal Service’s rulemaking authority,” the filing says.
