A federal judge in Boston temporarily blocked key parts of a U.S. Postal Service rule that would have tightened requirements for mail-in ballots ahead of the November midterm elections.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani issued a 14-day temporary restraining order Thursday after two lawsuits challenged the rule. One was brought by a coalition of 23 states, the District of Columbia, and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. The second came from voting-rights groups that included the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts.
The order followed an Aug. 24 Supreme Court decision that lifted earlier injunctions against President Donald Trump’s broader effort to restrict mail voting to U.S. citizens. Talwani’s latest ruling pauses enforcement of core provisions of the Postal Service’s final rule for elections held on or before Nov. 3.
The rule, issued Aug. 21, implements a March executive order from Trump. It requires states to comply with specific ballot-envelope designs, obtain USPS approval for those envelopes, and upload voter information into a Postal Service electronic portal. All outbound and return ballot envelopes would need unique barcodes. The agency could refuse to deliver ballots that fail to meet the standards or that are tied to voters not on the submitted lists.
Talwani wrote that the Postal Service offered no evidence of widespread fraudulent mail-in voting to justify the changes. She found the rule likely unlawful because it exceeds federal authority and conflicts with the Constitution’s assignment of election administration to the states.
“USPS’s interest in correcting an unsubstantiated problem through likely unconstitutional means is dwarfed by the overwhelming risk of pervasive disenfranchisement of citizens who need access to mail ballots in order to vote,” she wrote. “The balance of harms and public interest warrants a [temporary restraining order].”
Sophia Lin Lakin, a lawyer for the voting-rights groups at the ACLU, called the order a pause on “an unlawful power grab that would sow chaos and confusion for the millions of voters who depend on mail ballots.”
The White House and USPS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Trump’s March order argued that unique identifiers such as barcodes would create an “auditable mechanism” to confirm only citizens receive and cast ballots. Postmaster General David Steiner has defended the approach as a long-recommended operational measure rather than a political one. “To me, it’s not a political question; it’s a question of how do we most efficiently and securely move ballots,” he told a Senate committee when the rule was first proposed. “We’ve been recommending this for many years; all this does is make it a requirement.”
Every state allows some form of mail voting. Twenty-nine permit no-excuse absentee ballots, and eight conduct elections entirely by mail.