A second federal judge has blocked the Postal Service's new ballot-mail rule, this time in its entirety, seven weeks before the midterm elections. U.S. District Judge Carl J. Nichols, appointed to the D.C. bench during the Trump administration's first term, ruled late Saturday that the rule's core provisions exceed any power Congress gave the Postal Service, and he rejected the government's request to enjoin only the narrowest slice of it. The decision lands while an emergency stay application from the government sits pending at the Supreme Court, which has already intervened in this litigation once.
The opinion, dated September 13, covers three consolidated cases brought by Democratic campaign committees, Latino and civil rights organizations, and voting-rights groups. It is the second nationwide block of the rule in two weeks, following a preliminary injunction from a Massachusetts federal judge. Together the rulings frame a single question the Supreme Court will now likely answer: whether the Postal Service can decide how America's mail ballots move.
What the Rule Would Have Done
The rule's origin is Executive Order 14399, signed March 31, directing agencies to verify citizenship and protect "integrity" in federal elections. The Postal Service portion became a final rule titled Ballot Mail for Federal Elections, published August 26 and effective August 21, which rewrote the Domestic Mail Manual's election-mail sections.
Under the rule, election officials would have had to redesign ballot envelopes to meet new specifications, including a unique Intelligent Mail barcode, and submit designs to the Postal Service for review. They would also have had to enroll every mail voter in a new Federal Ballot Mail Portal, with name, address, and barcode, at least 30 days before the election. The Postal Service would then have verified each piece of outbound ballot mail against the portal before accepting it, and mail that failed verification would have been returned to the sender rather than delivered.
The portal did not exist when the rule took effect, and no state had enrolled. Election officials in Travis County, Texas and Madison, Wisconsin told the court they had already spent more than $31,000 combined on envelopes that do not meet the new design requirements.
The compliance burden was not small. The Massachusetts court's earlier ruling noted that roughly 10,000 election jurisdictions would have needed to redesign and reprint envelopes and submit voter data to a portal that did not exist. Election officials described the timeline as impossible: states keep voter data in different formats, and there is no common identifier to match state lists against a federal system.
Why the Judge Blocked It
Judge Nichols did not reach the constitutional question. He decided the case on statutory grounds: the rule is beyond the Postal Service's power. The Postal Reorganization Act authorizes the agency to collect, handle, transport, and deliver mail. Nothing in it, the judge held, authorizes the Postal Service to impose election procedures on state officials, build a voter-data system, or refuse to carry lawful mail because senders skipped a data-collection requirement. In the opinion's central formulation, "no statute grants the Postal Service the power to issue key parts of the Rule."
The government's defense rested on analogy: the Postal Service imposes special conditions on sensitive categories of mail, such as cremated remains and replica explosives, so ballot mail can carry its own conditions. The judge drew the line at the doorway. Those rules govern packaging and handling in transit. The ballot rule's core is portal recordkeeping and voter enrollment, which is election administration wearing a postmark.
The government asked that any injunction be limited to the non-delivery provision alone. The judge refused, finding the rule's parts not severable and a partial block more confusing than none. He also addressed the timing question directly: the rule's risk is that ballots mailed in compliance with state law would simply not arrive, and "once the election occurs, there can be no do-over and no redress." An injunction now, he wrote, preserves the status quo; enforcing the rule would risk changing the terms of an election already underway.
Before the merits, the judge walked through who gets to sue. Candidates had standing under the Supreme Court's recent Bost decision and the competitor-standing doctrine; voters under the Gill line of cases; and the two local governments for the money they had already spent on unusable envelopes. One piece of the plaintiffs' request did not survive: the DSCC's attempt to enjoin the executive order itself was denied, because the injury flows from the rule, not the order.
Two Courts, One Question
The Massachusetts case reached the same destination by a longer road. Judge Indira Talwani first declared central parts of the executive order unlawful in June, and the Supreme Court stayed that ruling in August on a 6-3 vote, holding the states had sued too early. After the final rule took effect, Talwani issued a temporary restraining order and then, on September 4, a preliminary injunction against the rule. The First Circuit declined to stay her injunction on September 10, writing that the government's argument "focuses on the 'trees while ignoring the forest'": elections are governed by states and Congress, and the rule would likely disenfranchise millions while delivering minimal gains against fraud, the panel concluded, as Reuters reported.
The government has asked the Supreme Court to stay Talwani's injunction. The emergency application, U.S. Postal Service v. California, is fully briefed and pending before Justice Jackson, who handles emergency matters from the First Circuit. A decision could come any day. The August stay was about timing, not merits: the Justices held the states challenged the order before the rule existed. The post-rule injunction is the fight the Court said could come later, and it has.
The D.C. ruling raises the stakes of that pending application without directly controlling it: even if the Court stays the Massachusetts injunction, the separate D.C. injunction would still bind the government unless it is also appealed and stayed. It also has a quirk the Massachusetts one does not. Because the plaintiff organizations have candidate and voter members in essentially every state, the judge treated the full-rule injunction as party-specific relief under the Court's recent CASA decision, which reaches nationwide in practice.
The Two Sides
The government's case is that the rule is a modest regulation of the mail itself, imposing reporting and design requirements while leaving eligibility decisions to the states, and that its purpose is confidence and efficiency. Solicitor General John Sauer has told the Supreme Court that once non-compliant envelopes enter the mailstream "there is no retrieving them," arguing the government needs the rule in place before ballot season peaks. The administration has also long tied mail voting to fraud claims, which the AP has reported as unsupported by evidence.
The challengers' case is that the rule is election administration by another name. They point out that the Constitution and federal statutes give states and Congress, not the executive branch, authority over elections; that the portal they were ordered to use does not exist; that local officials cannot redesign envelopes and rebuild voter lists in the weeks before ballots ship; and that voters who rely on mail would bear the cost of any failure. The American Postal Workers Union has filed its own brief opposing the rule, noting that verifying voter eligibility is not a postal worker's job, and that workers received no training on the verification system. A whistleblower report to Congress warned that the untested portal could delay or derail ballot delivery, the AP reported. A rule built for reliability, the challengers argue, was introduced through a system that was not ready to run.
This article takes no position on the underlying election-law fight. The procedural facts are settled: two federal judges, one appointed by each of the last two administrations, have now held that the rule exceeds the agency's authority, and the Supreme Court has the government's request before it.
What Happens Next
The calendar is the third judge in this case. Some states begin mailing ballots within weeks, and the litigation's central harm finding is that once an election happens, wrongly rejected ballots cannot be fixed. The government's choices are to wait for the Supreme Court's ruling on the Massachusetts stay, appeal the D.C. injunction to the D.C. Circuit, or both.
A stay decision in the government's favor would let the rule operate while the appeals play out, which would mean election officials learning a new system during the election it governs. A denial would leave both injunctions standing through the midterms and move the fight into the appeals courts on the merits. Either way, the Supreme Court is now positioned to decide how much of the nation's election mail runs on rules written by the Postal Service, and how much runs on rules written by the states.
The ruling's author adds a factual note of its own. Judge Nichols was appointed by the president whose executive order produced the rule, and his opinion is written in the language of statutory limits rather than political alignment. The Supreme Court's pending decision will decide whether that language carries.
Primary sources
- Nichols memorandum opinion, DSCC v. Trump, No. 26-cv-01114 (D.D.C., Sept. 13, 2026), for the holding, the ultra vires analysis, and the scope of the injunction.
- Federal Register, "Ballot Mail for Federal Elections," 91 FR 54966, for the rule's requirements.
- AP, "Second federal judge freezes Trump mail ballot order with US Supreme Court poised to weigh in," for the ruling and its context.
- Reuters via The Hindu, for the Talwani injunction and the First Circuit's denial of a stay.
- SCOTUSblog case page, U.S. Postal Service v. California, for the pending emergency application's status.