Federal Judge Blocks the Core of Trump's Mail-Voting Order for the 2026 Election

A federal judge in Boston on Thursday blocked the Trump administration from carrying out the two central provisions of a March executive order on elections, ruling that the federal government has no authority to build a national list of eligible voters or to use the Postal Service to decide who can vote by mail.

The decision came from U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani of the District of Massachusetts, an Obama appointee, in a 37-page opinion. It bars the administration from enforcing those provisions against the 23 states and the District of Columbia that sued, and it covers this November's election. Talwani granted the administration's motion to dismiss the states' challenge to how the order might apply in later years, finding that question not yet ripe.

What the order did

Trump signed the order, titled "Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections," in March. It directed two federal agencies to act.

• It told the Department of Homeland Security, working with the Social Security Administration, to compile a list of people "confirmed to be United States citizens" and eligible to vote in each state.
• It told the Postal Service to write a rule that would deliver mail ballots only to voters who appear on each state's federally approved list.

The order also directed the Justice Department to "prioritize the investigation and, as appropriate, the prosecution" of state and local officials who ran elections without using the federal list, and it sought to pull funding from jurisdictions that did not comply, according to the order's text and reporting by Roll Call and CBS News.

What the judge ruled

Talwani wrote that the Constitution leaves the administration of elections to the states, with a limited role for Congress, and that the laws the government cited, including the Help America Vote Act, do not give the president the powers the order claimed.

"The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections."

That line is from Talwani's opinion. On the citizen list, she wrote that "both Congress and the president lack any role regarding voter eligibility," and that no federal statute authorizes the government to create its own voter database. On the Postal Service, she wrote that "no law enacted by Congress delegates authority to control mail-in voting to USPS."

She also took up the order's enforcement language. The threat of prosecution, she wrote, would "intimidate local election officials" into relying on what she described as incomplete citizenship lists, and that fell outside the president's authority.

The timing

The ruling landed one day after Postmaster General David Steiner told a Senate Homeland Security hearing on Wednesday that the Postal Service would refuse to deliver mail ballots in states that did not hand over a list of approved voters. That made explicit what the agency's proposed rule had implied.

It was the second court to weigh the order and reach a different result on procedure. In late May, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols in Washington, a Trump appointee, declined to block the order in a separate suit brought by the Democratic National Committee, finding the plaintiffs had not yet shown harm. Those plaintiffs have appealed.

What each side says

The states, led by California, argued the order exceeded the president's constitutional authority. Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, one of the officials who brought the case, said in a statement: "The Constitution is clear: States run elections, not Trump. This is a major victory for American democracy."

The White House signaled it would appeal. Spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said the administration is "confident that we will ultimately prevail." The administration has cast the order as an effort to direct federal agencies to enforce existing bans on noncitizen voting. Trump has said for years, without evidence accepted by any court, that mail voting produces fraud, including in his 2020 loss to Joe Biden.

What happens now

For the 24 jurisdictions in the suit, the injunction means the Postal Service cannot withhold mail ballots and the Justice Department cannot pursue officials for declining to use the federal list, at least through the November election. The order's reach in states that did not sue, and in elections after this year, was not decided. An appeal would go to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

The full list of plaintiffs: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia.