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A divided Supreme Court on Monday eased the path for an executive order by President Donald Trump that would impose sweeping new restrictions on mail-in balloting for November's midterm elections, but the complex and fast-moving legal fight is not over.
The executive order would bar the U.S. Postal Service from sending mail-in ballots to voters not on lists of citizens created by federal agencies. States also would be obligated to send the ballots in envelopes that can be tracked to thwart fraud.
The President blamed such fraud in part for his loss in the 2020 presidential election.
With just over two months to go before pivotal elections, the high court's ruling - which overturned a lower court judge's block of the president's order - won't be the last word on whether it will be allowed to go forward.
The case now returns to the lower courts, and a key part of the executive order remains blocked because of a ruling in separate litigation that must also be resolved for the order to go into effect before November.
The legal fights have been closely watched by election officials who have expressed concerns about a quick timeline to comply with the order.
The high court's decision was not on the merits of the executive order but on a narrower legal question: whether 23 states and the District of Columbia had been harmed by the executive order and their challenge to the order met the legal bar.
In the unsigned opinion, conservatives on the court affirmed the administration's arguments that it was too soon to take legal action because agencies had yet to finalize the rules for implementing the order at the time the Trump appeal was filed. The Postal Service published its rule late Friday and said it plans to make it official Wednesday.
Richard Hasen, a UCLA law professor and director of the school's Safeguarding Democracy Project, in an online post called the ruling "narrow and technical" and said the issue could come back before the Supreme Court soon. He said it was "weird" that the court didn't address the Postal Service issuing a new rule.
The ruling postpones a final decision by a week or more, Hasen said, "when we will be even closer to the election and it will be impossible for states to comply with some of the rules that will come out."
If the executive order ultimately goes forward, it is likely to inject fresh uncertainty into an already high-stakes election that will determine which party controls the House and the Senate.
Some election officials said it will be a challenge to implement major new procedures so close to the contests. States face looming deadlines to begin sending out absentee ballots, and some would have to replace envelopes, train staff and make other changes to comply with the order.
The Supreme Court majority brushed aside those concerns in its decision, but acknowledged its ruling was not the ultimate word on the legality of Trump's executive order.
"The Court's disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful. On that score, time will tell," the majority wrote.
The decision came over the sharp objections of the court's three liberals.
"This ruling violates well-established precedents concerning this Court's equitable discretion and needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections," Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in an opinion. "It also lets another shoe drop in the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating for certain plaintiffs who seek to bring election-related challenges."
The Supreme Court's ruling for now overturns a New England appeals court ruling last month that found Trump's order would "sow confusion" and "threaten disenfranchisement of many eligible voters." The appeals court ratified a federal judge's block.
In June, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Massachusetts issued a summary judgment against the executive order, ruling that the president lacked constitutional authority to order changes in how states and local governments administer elections.
The Constitution gives states the primary role in election administration and assigns Congress the ability to set national standards for elections. The president has a more limited role.
In August, Talwani blocked the portion of the executive order on mail ballots for all states in a separate case brought by the League of Women Voters and other voting rights groups. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to instruct lower courts to lift that block on Trump's order as well, but the justices did not address the matter.
Groups that are suing over the executive order argued the administration had violated an injunction by publishing the Postal Service rules. Over the weekend, the groups asked Talwani to issue an order declaring the postal rule had no effect and to bar the administration from taking any further action.
Talwani told government lawyers to file responses by Tuesday morning and said they were "ignoring the confusion that the publication [of the rule] will engender."
In the case directly before the justices, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to reverse the appeals court ruling, saying its decision was "indefensible" and could impose "irreparable harm on the federal government" as the administration tries to shore up the integrity of elections.
The administration also argued that the plaintiffs in the case - the nearly two dozen states and the District of Columbia - lacked standing to challenge the executive order because rules were still in the works.
"The injunction is especially indefensible because the agencies are still deliberating over how (if at all) to implement the Order," the administration wrote.
The states and D.C. argued that Trump had overstepped his authority in issuing the executive order and warned of the possibility of major problems during November's elections.
"The consequences of allowing such transformative changes to take effect so close to this fall's elections would be extreme," the states wrote in filings. "Because of the high risk of errors and the limited window for correcting mistakes, many of the millions of voters who rely on mail voting - especially voters with disabilities and those in rural areas - would likely be denied mail ballots and, as a result, disenfranchised."
Officials from states that sued over the executive order promised to continue the litigation. In a social media post, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) emphasized that the ruling was procedural and states would continue to try to block the executive order. "States run their own elections," she wrote. "Not the Postal Service. Not the President."
The court "seemed to create complete chaos leading up to the midterm elections, waiting weeks after an administration filing, and just days before mail ballots go out, to completely rewrite the rules of the election," said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, which assists local and state election officials.
Some election officials concurred, saying the changes would be exceedingly difficult to implement in the months before the midterms.
States and the federal government would be responsible for creating lists showing who is eligible to receive mail ballots, and the risk of mismatches or eligible voters being left off those lists is high, they said.
The administration has been determining citizenship by using a federal database that contains some incomplete and inaccurate information. In some instances, eligible voters have had their registrations revoked because they were improperly identified as noncitizens, according to court records.
State voter rolls are constantly changing, and some states allow voters to register to vote up until Election Day. Election officials would be required to regularly update their lists, but the Postal Service has not yet made clear how states would do that.
In addition, under the new rule, the Postal Service would need to review and approve the designs of ballot envelopes for thousands of voting jurisdictions in the country - a steep challenge with a tight time frame and constrained budgets.
Counties typically order their envelopes a year or more in advance and would not have time to get new ones before November, said Jennifer Morrell, the chief executive of the Elections Group, which supports and trains election officials.
"It just seems a little bit reckless," she said of putting the new rule in place so close to the election.
Voting by noncitizens is rare, but it does happen. New Jersey recently disclosed that it had inadvertently registered thousands of noncitizens because of a software error, including about 340 who went on to cast ballots in recent years.
Trump, who has claimed that voter fraud is rampant, has taken other steps to exert federal control over elections.
He has been pressuring the Senate to pass the Save America Act, which would require voters to prove their citizenship to register and to show photo identification when voting.
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