Court blocks USPS from implementing Trump’s anti-mail voting order

By Jim Saksa

United States postal Services warning document seen during the ballots processing at the Los Angeles County Ballot Processing Center. Ballot counting in California typically continues for several days after Election Day, as mail ballots remain eligible if they are postmarked by Election Day and received within seven days of the election. (Photo by Weston Hancock / SOPA Images/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

In the latest setback for President Donald Trump’s anti-voting agenda, a federal court on Wednesday granted the NAACP’s request to halt the U.S. Postal Service’s (USPS) implementation of his executive order against mail voting.

The court order comes a week after a federal judge in Massachusetts blocked implementation of Trump’s diktat, calling its primary provisions “legally void.” Unlike the Massachusetts decision, which applied to just the 23 Democratic-led states that sued, the new ruling covers the entire nation.

“This ruling in favor of the NAACP’s case marks another major blow to Donald Trump’s attempt to rig the election,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement. “The president is failing, and the people are winning. If we all vote in November, we can put an end to his madness.” 

The ruling stems from a lawsuit the NAACP brought against USPS in 2020, when mail delays threatened voters’ ability to cast ballots during the COVID-19 pandemic. A 2021 settlement required USPS to safeguard mail-in voting in future federal elections and prioritize the timely delivery of election-related mail through 2028.

The NAACP asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to enforce that stipulation last month, after USPS posted a draft rule on May 29 aimed at implementing Trump’s March executive order, which directed the Postal Service to only deliver mail ballots if states first handed over their voter lists to the administration. The civil rights group argued the proposed rule would have violated their settlement agreement with USPS.

U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan granted the NAACP’s request, saying that the proposed rule clearly violated the settlement’s terms and dismissing USPS’s arguments to the contrary as “without merit.” 

The ruling is the latest in a series of recent judicial decisions checking Trump’s attempts to take over elections. In addition to the Massachusetts ruling, since last week federal courts in several states have rejected the administration’s bid to obtain voter rolls, barred its use of a database to check voters’ citizenship, and permanently blocked Trump’s 2025 anti-voting executive order, which required documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration.