On March 31, 2026, Trump signed an executive order titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections” that directs DHS to create federal voter lists of verified citizens for each state, and orders the Postal Service to send mail ballots only to individuals on approved state citizenship lists.
The order was partly drafted by Kurt Olsen, who was involved in efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and Heather Honey of DHS. It represents the most direct federal intrusion into state election administration in modern history.
States immediately rebelled. New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan declared: “The Federal Government cannot usurp New Hampshire's express constitutional authority to run elections.” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes noted that mail-in ballots were “designed by Republicans and have kept the GOP in power in the state for years.” Oregon and other states pushed back.
Election expert David Becker said: “This will be blocked by the federal courts before the ink is dry.” UCLA's Rick Hasen called it “virtually impossible to implement in time for November's elections.” The Constitution reserves the “Times, Places and Manner” of elections to the states under Article I, Section 4.
This is Trump's second election executive order — the first (March 2025) was partially blocked by federal courts. The man who voted by mail in Florida while calling it “cheating” is now using executive power to restrict how 330 million Americans vote.
By June 2026, the order was moving from paper to practice. The Postal Service published a proposed rule to track and screen mail ballots, DHS issued implementation memos, and plaintiffs told a federal appeals court the order was “already being implemented” and had to be blocked before it confused voters in the fall. A separate challenge was argued in Boston, where the judge had not yet ruled.
The order then lost on appeal. On July 25, 2026, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 decision, refused the Justice Department's request to lift a June 25 injunction that had blocked key provisions of the order in 23 Democratic-led states. The lower court had found that requiring USCIS and the Social Security Administration to build a federal “state citizenship list” of eligible voters, and routing mail ballots only to people on it, was likely unconstitutional. The appeals court left that block in place while the case proceeds. The DOJ had signaled it would seek emergency relief from the Supreme Court if it lost, setting up the next stage of the fight over who controls the 2026 mail ballot.
On July 27, 2026, the administration did exactly that. The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court, on its emergency docket, to put the June injunction on hold and let the order take effect in the 23 states and D.C. that challenged it, escalating the fight 99 days before the November midterms. The Court ordered the states to respond by August 3. As reporting across outlets noted, restricting mail-in ballots stands to benefit Republicans, since Democratic voters have been more likely to vote by mail. A single emergency order from the Court could now decide whether the federal government screens the nation's mail ballots this fall.
On August 24, 2026, the Supreme Court lifted one of the two injunctions against the order. By 6-3, in an unsigned decision, it granted emergency applications from the Justice Department and a dozen Republican-led states and stayed Judge Indira Talwani's June injunction covering the 23 states and D.C. that had sued.
The majority did not uphold the order. It held that those states had sued too soon, reasoning that any injury would come from “the downstream action that the Secretary might take in the future,” and attached the caveat that its ruling “does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful.”
Talwani's separate nationwide injunction of August 11, in the case brought by the League of Women Voters and other non-profits, was not before the Court and remains in force. Sotomayor and Kagan dissented together; Jackson dissented separately, warning the ruling “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.”
The order has a second half that the mail-ballot litigation never reached, and it moved in September. A separate section directs federal agencies to compile and send each state's chief election official a list of individuals confirmed to be citizens aged 18 or older, no fewer than 60 days before each federal election. On September 1, 2026, DHS published a “State Citizenship Lists Portal” webpage saying the lists were coming soon. A June DHS memo had set the target of having it fully functional by Friday, September 4.
The same day the portal appeared, the Electronic Privacy Information Center sued DHS and the Social Security Administration in federal court in Maryland, represented by Protect Democracy and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The 41-page complaint argues that no statute authorizes the government to centralize this data, and that doing so violates the Privacy Act of 1974, the Social Security Act, the Administrative Procedure Act, and the constitutional allocation of election authority to the states.
The complaint's central factual claim is about data quality rather than intent: “Defendants are creating the State Citizenship Lists by repurposing data the government admits is unreliable, outdated, and incomplete.” It alleges DHS is “aggressively pushing state election officials to use this admittedly unreliable data to purge their voter rolls of purported non-citizens, under threat of fines, penalties, and even prison time.” The lists are not built from state voter registration files but from federal databases whose citizenship information is incomplete, which is why the plaintiffs argue actual citizens will be left off.
EPIC Deputy Director John Davisson: “Building a database containing the identities, Social Security numbers, addresses, and citizenship information of every U.S. citizen is an extraordinary illegal overreach.” The suit asks the court to declare the lists unlawful and order them deleted. No ruling had issued as of September 3.
The mail-ballot half reached a decision point in the first week of September, as ballots began going out. Judge Indira Talwani had issued a temporary restraining order against the USPS rule on August 27. After a hearing on September 3, she replaced it on Friday night, September 4, with a preliminary injunction.
The injunction blocks the specific machinery: the mandatory Outbound and Return Federal Ballot Mail Envelope Standards, mandatory registration for the Postal Service Federal Ballot Mail Portal, mandatory voter enrollment in that portal, and parts of the Outbound Federal Ballot Mail Verification procedures. The plaintiffs are the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts and a multistate group led by California.
Talwani's reasoning was structural. “Congress has never delegated its Elections Clause power to the USPS,” she wrote, finding the rule “clashes with Congress's statutory scheme, and is unconstitutional where it intrudes not only on Congress's Elections Clause powers but also that power left to the States.”
On the timing, she wrote that “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.” Against that she set the evidence for the rule: “the record includes no evidence relating to fraudulent mail voting to support the rushed implementation of the Final Rule.”
The administration moved immediately and twice. On Saturday, September 5, the Justice Department asked the First Circuit for a stay. On Sunday, September 6, Solicitor General John Sauer took it to the Supreme Court, seeking a stay pending appeal and an administrative stay. Sauer's filing characterizes the rule as imposing “only modest envelope-design and addressee-information requirements for federal-election ballots sent via U.S. Mail.” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson ordered responses from the plaintiffs by 4 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, September 9.
The calendar is the pressure. North Carolina and Alabama began mailing ballots as early as September 4.
The opposition to the rule's timing now includes Republican election officials. On September 9, 2026, the day responses to the Justice Department's Supreme Court application were due, Republican secretaries of state from Kentucky, North Dakota, South Dakota, Georgia, New Hampshire and Kansas, joined by Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson and 26 local election officials in Georgia and Utah, filed a brief urging the Court not to let the USPS rule take effect for the midterms. The signers include Georgia's Brad Raffensperger, Kentucky's Michael Adams and North Dakota's Michael Howe.
They took no position on whether the rule is legal or good policy. Their argument was the calendar: “late changes breed confusion, that confusion keeps eligible voters from voting, and that a chaotic election erodes confidence in the result.” They wrote that “attempting to implement this rule now significantly increases the risks of problems to the election,” and that “in many respects, the election is already underway.” Federal law requires states to send ballots to military and overseas voters by September 19.
A Florida county previewed what the rule's envelope review could look like. Leon County Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley voluntarily submitted his office's outgoing mail-ballot envelope for Postal Service review shortly after USPS posted its final rule. On September 2, 2026, USPS told him the design failed because the line “return service requested” sat about 0.236 of an inch from the return address, when the standard calls for a quarter inch. The difference was 0.014 of an inch. The office had used the same envelopes for many tens of thousands of ballots in the 2024 elections and the 2026 primary without incident. “It's ridiculous,” Earley said.
He appealed. After an initial denial and more back and forth, USPS approved the design on September 10. His office plans to mail roughly 32,000 vote-by-mail ballots by Florida's statutory September 24 deadline, and he had said there was not enough time to reprint. While the court injunction stands, seeking USPS approval is voluntary. Earley also said the portal election offices would use to submit designs and voter lists was not available. He described the larger risk as the confusion itself: “The chaos factor is the real problem. I've had voters tell me 'I don't trust anything anymore, so I'm just not going to vote.'”
On September 14, 2026, the Supreme Court denied the administration's request to let the Postal Service rule take effect for the midterms, saying the government “is unlikely to succeed on the merits,” with Justices Alito and Thomas dissenting. A separate injunction from Judge Carl Nichols also blocks the rule. Trump said the justices “are merely a shell of their original selves” (see The Supreme Court Keeps the Postal Service Ballot Rule Out of the Midterms, and Trump Calls the Justices 'a Shell of Their Original Selves').
Update (September 28, 2026): ProPublica reported how the order came to be, and its sourcing should be read for what it is: one outlet, relying mostly on people who spoke anonymously. According to “several people knowledgeable about the discussions,” the administration first floated requiring all mail ballots to be delivered exclusively by certified mail, which would have meant voters had to be home to sign for them. It was dropped after what ProPublica called vehement Postal Service objections. “It was just, for many reasons, a terrible idea,” one top Postal Service official said. White House spokesperson Lauren Bis rejected the idea that the proposal was unworkable and said that played no part in the decision “to go in another direction.”
ProPublica also reported that postal officials were cut out of later conversations, and that when career staff proposed a minimal way to comply, collecting states' voter lists without using them to decide which ballots to deliver, the White House counsel rebuffed it as “not enough,” according to a former official. The White House team wanted an entire batch mailing rejected if even one envelope did not match. The Commerce Department confirmed on the record that Secretary Howard Lutnick served in “an advisory and coordination capacity” in drafting the order. Members of the Postal Service's Board of Governors stayed silent partly out of concern Trump would try to fire them; one source said, “The board was being careful how or when it took action, knowing that it might be its last action.” Bis said the order “added important safeguards to vote-by-mail.”