A federal judge blocked the U.S. Postal Service from carrying out its plan for President Donald Trump’s mail ballot executive order, finding that the proposal violated a settlement in a 2020 lawsuit against the agency.
Trump had directed USPS to only transmit ballots for states that submit to the agency lists of their mail-in voters and that meet other requirements for their mail voting programs. Previously, a judge in Boston had halted the Postal Service from implementing the order for two-dozen states that challenged it in court. But the new ruling from US District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who sits in Washington DC, blocks the directives nationwide.
If courts let Trump’s order from March 2026 stand, it would give the federal government an unprecedented role in elections — and could put even more voter data in the hands of Trump officials searching for supposed election fraud.
Sullivan’s order stems from a lawsuit the NAACP originally brought against the Postal Service in 2020 because of policy changes that slowed mail delivery as the pandemic election was approaching. A 2021 settlement required the agency to publish guidance documents detailing how it would prioritize “the monitoring and timely delivery of Election Mail.” Part of the settlement gave the court authority to oversee USPS’ actions on this issue.
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Sullivan wrote in the Wednesday opinion that, under the agency’s proposed regulations for implementing the Trump executive order, ballots would not be delivered to voters if those ballots were not compliant with the executive order’s requirements.
“The Proposed Rule violates paragraph 2 of the Agreement because the Postal Service cannot post documents reflecting ‘practices and policies for prioritizing the monitoring and timely delivery of Election Mail’ if its policies provide that it will not accept ‘noncompliant mailing’ and therefore will not deliver mail-in or absentee ballots to some voters, and if it will not mail ballots to any voters in a state where the state ‘declines or fails to certify a list,’” Sullivan said.
Trump’s order would also require that mail ballot envelopes have individualized barcodes for automated tracking. That policy is seen as a best practice for election administration but one that many jurisdictions would face challenges in implementing, because of the cost of such a change.
It also directs the Department of Homeland Security to draw from federal databases to assemble lists of voting age citizens in each state, stoking fears that the lists will be used for overly aggressive voter purges.
“This ruling in favor of the NAACP’s case marks another major blow to Donald Trump’s attempt to rig the election,” said NAACP President Derrick Johnson. “The President is failing, and the people are winning.”
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CNN has reached out to USPS for comment on the new ruling.
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