Overview
- The Supreme Court on Monday declined to lift lower‑court injunctions against the administration's mail‑voting rule, allowing states to use their existing ballot‑by‑mail procedures for the November midterms.
- Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented while Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed that the rules should not be imposed now because election officials lack time to implement them.
- The disputed plan would have forced states to send voter registration lists to USPS and require individualized barcoded ballot envelopes with instructions for USPS to reject mismatched ballots.
- A USPS whistleblower and multiple election officials warned that a hurriedly built federal portal and rushed testing could cause ballots or whole mail batches to be withheld or rejected.
- Parallel rulings are changing rules in some places: the Fifth Circuit recently reinstated nine provisions of Texas's SB1, and continued litigation promises an uneven patchwork of mail‑voting rules after the midterms.