Supreme Court Makes Decision In Mail-In Ballot Fight Ahead Of Midterms

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for President Donald Trump to begin enforcing parts of an executive order aimed at restricting mail-in voting ahead of the midterm elections.

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In an, a majority of the justices agreed to pause a lower-court ruling by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston that blocked the Trump administration from carrying out portions of a March executive action. Monday’s order allows the Department of Homeland Security to move forward with creating and distributing “State Citizenship Lists” cataloging adult U.S. citizens in each state ahead of federal elections.

Monday’s decision is an interim victory for Trump but does not resolve the order’s underlying legality, CNBC reported.

The Supreme Court found that the Trump administration was likely to prevail on its argument that the district court lacked jurisdiction to block the order, concluding that the states challenging it had not shown the concrete and imminent injuries required to bring their claims at this stage.

“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 court wrote. “But the Order itself does not harm the States, so the District Court lacked jurisdiction to bar the Government from trying to implement it.”

A separate injunction Talwani issued on Aug. 11 still bars the Postal Service from implementing procedural changes ahead of the Nov. 3 elections, meaning the administration would need to overcome that order before the USPS changes could take effect for the midterms.

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In March, Trump signed an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to take steps to create and distribute “State Citizenship Lists” cataloging residents who are U.S. citizens and will be over the age of 18 at the time of an upcoming federal election. The order also directed the U.S. Postal Service to begin a rulemaking process involving new procedures for mail-in and absentee ballots.

Last Friday, the USPS issued a establishing new standards for mail-in ballots used in federal elections. Among other requirements, election officials would have to submit voter names, addresses, and unique ballot-envelope barcodes through a federal portal before outbound ballots are presented to the Postal Service. Mailings that fail to comply with the rule’s requirements would not be accepted and would be returned to the authorized ballot mailer. The USPS rule remains subject to the separate federal injunction blocking its implementation ahead of the midterms.

All three liberal justices dissented. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a solo dissent to blast the court’s order.

“This is not a close call. The Government suffers no harm from an injunction limiting unlawful actions, much less ‘hypothetical’ and ‘speculative’ acts that the Government says it was not even sure it would take,” Jackson wrote.

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This is a developing story. Stay with The Daily Wire for updates.