A federal judge on Tuesday, August 11, barred the Trump administration from implementing the president’s mail voting executive order anywhere in the country, expanding a block that had previously applied only to the 23 states, plus the District of Columbia, that sued. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, ruling this time in a separate lawsuit brought by the League of Women Voters and other voting rights organizations, prohibited the U.S. Postal Service from continuing to carry out the order’s directives in every state. “The executive branch has no authority to regulate elections,” she wrote. It is the third federal court ruling against the order since June, and Talwani noted the timing herself: the November 3 midterm elections are now less than 90 days away.
What the Executive Order Tried to Do
Trump signed the executive order in March 2026, his second attempt to set national election rules by presidential directive. The order had two central components. First, it directed the Department of Homeland Security to assemble a federal list of citizens for use in verifying voter rolls — a function the Constitution and federal law assign to states, which register voters and maintain their own rolls. Second, it directed the U.S. Postal Service to change how it handles election mail in ways that would restrict the delivery of mail ballots. Mail voting has been a repeated target of the president’s false claims about election fraud, and the order followed his sustained public campaign against it. The Constitution’s Elections Clause assigns authority over the time, place, and manner of federal elections to state legislatures, subject to override by Congress. It does not mention the president.
How the Litigation Got Here
The order has now lost in federal court three times in seven weeks. On June 25, Judge Talwani granted summary judgment to 23 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia, blocking the order’s core provisions — the Postal Service ballot restrictions and the Homeland Security citizen list — as applied to those states. Her reasoning rested on the Elections Clause: the power to regulate the manner of federal elections belongs to states and Congress, not the president. In early August, a federal appeals court upheld that block. The administration said the fight was not over and signaled it would seek relief from the Supreme Court. Tuesday’s ruling closes the geographic gap. Because it came in a separate case brought by the League of Women Voters and allied voting rights groups rather than by state governments, its relief is not limited to the states that sued: it bars the Postal Service from carrying out the order’s directives nationwide, including in the 27 states that never joined the earlier lawsuit. As a practical matter, that means voters in Republican-led states that declined to sue now have the same protection as voters in the states that did.
Why the Second Case Matters
The nationwide ruling also changes the administration’s path forward. Its strategy has been to get the original injunction narrowed or lifted by the Supreme Court. Tuesday’s ruling means that even a Supreme Court victory in the states’ case would leave the second injunction standing — a separate order, in a separate case, with separate plaintiffs, that the administration would have to litigate independently. Rulings against the order now stack: a district court judgment, an appeals court affirmance, and a second district court judgment covering the whole country. Each rests on the same constitutional foundation, that election regulation belongs to states and Congress. For the administration to implement the order before November, it would need to unwind all of them in under 90 days, through courts that have so far ruled against it unanimously.
The Larger Pattern
The executive order is one half of a two-track effort to change federal election rules before the midterms. The other half is legislative: the SAVE America Act, which would require in-person documentary proof of citizenship to register and photo identification to vote, passed the House in February and has failed repeatedly in the Senate. Trump has demanded the Senate pass it, saying it would “guarantee the midterms.” The executive-order track has now been stopped by the courts three times; the legislative track is stalled at least until the Senate returns in September. Both tracks share a feature the courts keep pointing to: they attempt to move authority over elections from the states, where the Constitution places it, to the federal government, in the months before a national election.
Where Things Stand
The administration is expected to appeal Tuesday’s ruling and to continue pursuing Supreme Court review of the earlier one. Election officials in the states, meanwhile, are administering the fall election under existing law: mail voting operates as each state’s legislature has provided, and no federal citizen list exists for roll verification. Ballots in some states begin going out to overseas and military voters in September under federal law. Judge Talwani’s observation — less than 90 days to the election — cuts both ways: it is late for the administration to change the rules, and it is late for any court to let it. The People’s Podium will follow the appeals.