the pull quote is overstated -- states that have provided voter roll personal information to Trump will not (in principle) have mail-in ballots withheld
vote early, in-person if you can
www.nytimes.com/2026/09/01/u...“[T]he main takeaway for me is that the Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans. One-third of all Americans cast their ballots by mail, and the U.S.P.S. puts all of their votes at risk.”
there is a very special birthday boy who would have been very disappointed if they hadn't
https://www.propublica.org/article/m...nfranchisementTop U.S. Postal Service officials tasked with issuing new regulations on mail voting expressed concerns in internal meetings about how the rules they were drafting could delay or block ballots from reaching large swaths of eligible voters for the upcoming midterms, but the rules moved forward anyway, ProPublica has learned.
if one ballot is wrongly addressed, a name misspelled, or the voter recently got married and changed their name, the USPS will withhold thousands of others, if the final rule stands
good on NC
Preliminary injunction against the new USPS rule issues, mooting her previous TRO and DOJ's emergency appeal of it
https://storage.courtlistener.com/re...8449.285.0.pdf
Intervenor-Defendants’ assurance that compliance will be feasible in their States seems implausible given the practical implications of the Final Rule. See Intervenors’ Opp’n 18–19 [Doc. No. 234]. As assessed by an expert in election administration, as to all States, “[n]one of the Rule’s requirements can feasibly be implemented before the November 3, 2026 General Election.” Patrick Decl. ¶ 18 [Doc. No. 264-1].61 The budgets for election administration have already been set, id. ¶ 34, State election training and procedures have largely already been finalized, id. ¶ 33, and States typically stagger the types of changes mandated by the Final Rule (like ballot redesign) across odd-numbered years off cycle from federal elections, to allow sufficient time for proper implementation, id. ¶ 85. Now, 60 days before the November 3, 2026 midterms, the Final Rule would require 10,000 different election jurisdictions to conform to new ballot design requirements (requiring many to re-design their ballots), have a wave of new designs undergo Mail Design Analyst review, id. ¶ 79, print new designs from their vendors (typically ranging from four to sixteen weeks in lead time), id. ¶ 86, and then, contingent on technological capabilities, collate and submit voter information to a portal that does not yet exist and has not been proven to work, id. ¶¶ 94, 97; see Monteith Decl. ¶ 3 [Doc. No. 280-1]. 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 for Plaintiff Organizations’ members, regardless of residence, is practically inevitable.
we see this over and over again, DOJ declining to defend the lawfulness of executive actions and appealing judicial rulings that would temporarily prevent them from going into effect
Before the Supreme Court, Defendants and Intervenor-Defendants again declined to contest the merits of this court’s final judgment finding the EO uncons utional.
Finding this court’s review of the merits premature, the Supreme Court stayed the injunction in California I. Id. at *5. The Supreme Court specified, however, that the disposition of the government’s emergency application “does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful.” Id.
In sum, the court finds that Plaintiff States and Organizations are also likely to succeed on the merits of their claims that the USPS exceeded its statutory authority by promulgating the Final Rule because the Cons ution reserves election regulation to Congress and the States, Congress has not authorized the USPS to make requirements of States before permitting use of the USPS for mailing their ballots, and that the Final Rule impermissibly establishes a new category of nonmailable material.
On the record before this court, the myriad aforementioned obstacles and negligible amount of time for officials to familiarize themselves with new processes (let alone successfully implement the new requirements) will make compliance by State and local officials with the Final Rule “virtually impossible” for the November 3, 2026 midterm elections.60 And because the USPS has conditioned sending mail ballots on compliance, disenfranchisement of Plaintiff Organizations’ members is unavoidable, rather than hypothetical for the upcoming elections. See Fish v. Kobach, 840 F.3d 710, 752 (10th Cir. 2016) (“[T]here can be no ‘do-over’ or redress of a denial of the right to vote after an election[.]”).
In balancing the harms based on the record before the court, the court finds, on one side, 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, see Wesberry v. Sanders, 376 U.S. 1, 17 (1964) (referencing this eminently “precious” right) and, on the other side, that the record includes no evidence relating to fraudulent mail voting to support the rushed implementation of the Final Rule.62 The court finds moreover that enjoining the Final Rule’s mandatory provisions cannot harm the USPS or any State where “there is generally no public interest in the perpetuation of unlawful agency action[.]” Rhode Island v. Trump, 155 F.4th 35, 50 (1st Cir. 2025); see also Monteith Decl. ¶ 3 [Doc. No. 280-1] (asserting that the Portal is not currently operational).
Trump is wasting money, time and political capital cracking down on coalition members now
https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics...igating-utahs/Trump’s DOJ is investigating Utah’s election chief for refusing to hand over voter data, it says in letter
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/0...cials-01070426Republican chief election officials from seven states said that it’s too late for President Donald Trump’s mail-in ballot order to be implemented before the midterm election, urging the Supreme Court to not allow the rule to go into effect in a brief submitted to the court on Wednesday.
Trump’s order, signed in March, aimed to crack down on mail-in voting and assert federal control ahead of November’s election. In August, the U.S. Postal Service released a final rule that would allow it to refuse delivering ballots to states that failed to provide lists of eligible voters or adhere to approved envelope styles.
USPS already trying to reject ballots based on new hypertechnical design requirements
USPS withholding an entire county's mail-in ballots because of a barely visible spacing error is arbitrary, outrageous bull
A Florida county’s mail-in ballot envelope design was almost rejected by the U.S. Postal Service for less than two-hundredths of an inch.
Leon County, Florida’s mail ballot envelope design placed the words “return service requested” 0.236 inches away from its election office’s return address, when it was supposed to be a quarter-inch, leading the USPS to reject it on September 2, the Tallahassee Democrat reports. The county’s supervisor of elections, Mark Earley, called it “ridiculous.”
After Earley’s office filed an appeal, the envelope design was eventually accepted.
“After several requests to postal employees today, I was granted a temporary certification for my envelopes in case the rule goes into effect. If the rule does not go into effect, then my envelopes are completely fine. So either way, we are good this election!” Earley told the Democrat in an email, referring to new USPS design rules resulting from President Trump’s executive order restricting voting by mail.https://newrepublic.com/post/215342/...-spacing-issueIf the county had not been granted a reprieve, Leon County would have been stuck, as a statute requires ballots to be sent out to the county’s voters by September 24, a deadline that is too soon to create new envelopes. Earley told the newspaper that “these exact same envelopes have been used to mail many tens of thousands of ballots to Leon County voters in the 2024 elections and in the 2026 primary election without incident.”
Last edited by Winehole23; 09-11-2026 at 11:09 PM.
(that Leon County went 60-39 for Kamala and is 30% Black is surely coincidental)
1CA denies the federal intervenors', states' and USPS's motion for a stay
The district court concluded that the Final Rule was likely uncons utional because the United States Cons ution assigns to the States the authority to administer elections subject to alterations imposed by Congress. The court determined that Congress had provided no authority for the Postal Service to promulgate a rule that regulates the manner of elections. It also found that, as a practical matter, it would be impossible for States to comply with the Final Rule's detailed requirements in the time remaining before the November 3 election, thus resulting in the potential disenfranchisement of millions of voters across the country. Appellants, various federal officials and en ies as well as Intervenor States, have filed motions to stay the preliminary injunction. The Postal Service also requests an administrative stay. The motions are denied....And moreover, there is no record evidence of past fraud or a likelihood of impending fraud related to the November 3 election.https://storage.courtlistener.com/re...505918.0_1.pdfThe motions for a stay are denied. The USPS's request for an administrative stay is denied as moot.
Ultra vires, USPS likely acted beyond the scope of its power
storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee sitting in DC, issues a preliminary injunction blocking the entire U.S. Postal Service mail ballot rule.
Ultra vires, USPS likely acted beyond the scope of its power
storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee sitting in DC, issues a preliminary injunction blocking the entire U.S. Postal Service mail ballot rule.
SCOTUS rejects Trump's USPS scheme, the rule came too close to the election
Alito cries
https://www.do entcloud.org/do e...621761-26a305/The application for stay presented to JUSTICEJACKSON and by her referred to the Court is denied. The Government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to the District Court’s preliminary injunction. And the equitable factors applicable for obtaining emergency relief from this Court do not favor a stay. JUSTICE KAVANAUGH, concurring. In my view, based on the briefing the Court has received at this interim stage, there is at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service’s statutory authority. See 39 U. S. C. §401(2).But applying the rule in the 2026 elections would be arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections
the plot to turbo the midterms has failed, but the new USPS postmark rules can still nibble away at the edges of mail-in voting
https://boltsmag.org/usps-postmark-r...election-year/Election mail that people leave at their local post office in Southern Oregon, where Schilling is based, typically sits overnight until it is collected in the morning since evening dispatches were slashed nationwide at the end of last year. The mail is then trucked nearly 300 miles to a Portland facility that processes mail for most of the state, where it is postmarked, then sent back to the local post office for delivery.
“Any mail that’s getting dropped into a blue box is not getting postmarked on the same day, and likely not on the day after either,” Schilling said. “The mail is so slow that it is an unreasonable amount of lead time that the normal person wouldn’t expect.”
Late last year, USPS announced that this practice was now official policy: It would no longer postmark mail automatically on the date it is received.
Trump melts the down
'These are not the people I interviewed"
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