Court must enforce injunction blocking USPS from finalizing rule restricting mail voting, says voting rights groups

A coalition of pro-voting organizations is asking a federal court to stop the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) from finalizing a rule restricting mail-in voting this week.

On Saturday night, the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts (LWVMA) and other civic and civil rights organizations filed an emergency motion to have a U.S. District Court enforce its injunction against the USPS’s plans to execute part of President Donald Trump’s executive order against mail voting.

The postal service announced a final rule Friday night to implement those plans, stating they will immediately go into effect should that injunction — and another currently blocking it — be lifted by the U.S. Supreme Court.

However, on Aug. 11, U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani ruled that the postal service needed to cease those plans, including any measures involving “refusing to transmit mail-in or absentee ballots; or otherwise initiating or completing rulemaking to promulgate the specific regulations outlined in” Trump’s executive order.

The USPS’s Friday night announcement, which will be officially published on Aug. 26, is the agency’s promulgation of that rule, with a retroactively listed effective date of Aug. 21. The postal service said it needed to date it as such to ensure it could be rolled out in time for November’s midterm elections.

“By issuing this final rule, the Trump administration has flouted the court’s injunction,” the voting rights groups said in a statement. “The final rule threatens further chaos for voters, civic organizations, and election officials by seeking to impose last-minute changes to mail voting rules. Enforcement of the court’s preliminary injunction is necessary to hold this administration accountable for its unlawful action and make clear that voters can confidently cast their mail ballot free from federal interference this November.”

The final rule acknowledges the injunctions, saying it won’t be enacted unless the Supreme Court intervenes, allowing it to move forward. 

As the civil rights groups wrote in their emergency motion, the USPS did this in defiance of the injunctions and without appealing its case to the court that issued them.

Representatives actually met with USPS officials the morning after the agency announced its final rule plans. In that meeting, postal service officials said they disagreed with both the injunctions and the groups’ intentions to ask the court to enforce them.

“That the Rule disclaims any additional implementation steps by USPS for the November election while the injunction remains in place does not change the fact that the very issuance of this Rule with an immediate effective date is expressly forbidden by this Court’s injunction, especially where the Rule itself states that it is ‘for’ the November 3, 2026 election,” reads the voting rights groups’ memo in support of the motion. “Defendants cannot simultaneously maintain that the Rule must take effect immediately because of the November election and that the rulemaking was not for the November election.”

The groups are asking the district court to reinforce that the postal service’s final rule “has no force or effect” before November. They are also asking the court to ensure the agency takes “no implementation or preparatory steps” for enacting the rule this year, and for the postal service to file weekly compliance updates. 

The rule was initially blocked because the federal judge said that Trump’s executive order was likely unconstitutional, and also that making such drastic changes this close to the midterms could disturb voters’ confidence in the elections. 

The civil rights groups’ court filing notes that the USPS could have dated the rule for future elections after 2026 without violating the terms of the injunction. Doing so also would not have stirred up the kind of chaos for November’s elections that the injunction seeks to prevent.

“The issuance of the Final Rule with immediate effect will also sow widespread confusion among election officials and the public, thereby undermining voter confidence and disrupting the administration of elections,” the groups’ court memo reads. “Defendants have flouted the unambiguous terms of this Court’s injunction and again injected the very chaos into the run up to the election that necessitated an injunction in the first instance.”

The groups asked the court to have the defendants, the Trump administration, file any opposition to their motion by Aug. 25, to get ahead of the Aug. 26 publish date for the final rule.

The Justice Department (DOJ) told the court today that it plans to file an opposing motion, arguing that the rule does not violate the injunction because the USPS “makes clear that it will have no effect whatsover” before November unless it obtains relief from the Supreme Court.*

DOJ said it plans to file a more detailed motion on that argument, but that a deadline of Aug. 27 — after the rule would be officially published — would “be more reasonable.”

*Update 1:05 pm ET: The story has been updated to reflect that the Trump administration filed a motion stating it plans to oppose the pro-voting groups’ emergency request for enforcement of the injunction blocking USPS’s final rule promulgation.