Federal judge blocks Trump’s anti-mail voting executive order again — this time nationwide

A federal judge in Massachusetts Tuesday issued another order blocking the United States Postal Service (USPS) from implementing President Donald Trump’s sweeping attack on mail voting and his attempt to create a national voter registration list before the midterm elections.

District Judge Indiria Talwani agreed with a coalition of voting-rights groups led by the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts that Trump’s March 2026 anti-voting executive order (EO) was likely unconstitutional, noting that the administration didn’t even attempt to argue otherwise. 

“Throughout the multiple actions before district courts, courts of appeal, and the Supreme Court of the United States, the federal government has declined to defend the constitutionality of the EO’s directives,” Talwani wrote. “Instead, the federal government has asked this court and others to postpone judicial review on standing and ripeness grounds, arguing that no party may challenge the EO’s constitutionality until the USPS promulgates a Final Rule.”

Despite the government’s requests to the contrary, Talwani decided to review the EO because less than 90 days remain before the midterm elections and millions of Americans who “rely on mail voting require clarity as to how or whether they will vote in November,” she wrote.

This is the second time Talwani has blocked implementation of Trump’s EO. But unlike the first, this preliminary injunction will now cover the entirety of the nation. In June, the judge ruled in a separate lawsuit and prohibited the order’s implementation in 23 states and Washington, D.C., which she alluded to in her order Tuesday.

After the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that earlier decision, the Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court, which accepted briefing on an emergency stay request last week and could issue a ruling any day now to either suspend Talwani’s order or affirm it.

Meanwhile, in two separate lawsuits, the federal appellate court for the District of Columbia has allowed the federal government to continue implementing the order. 

Talwani initially declined to grant LWVMA a preliminary injunction last month because, at the time, a D.C. judge’s order blocking the EO was still standing. The appeals court later stayed that decision. 

Trump’s executive order (EO) directs states to send USPS a list of voters who asked to vote by mail. The Postal Service would then develop new envelopes for mail ballots with barcodes linking them to those individual voters and refuse to deliver ballots to or from voters not on the pre-approved lists.

In her decision Tuesday, Talwani repeatedly emphasized that the Trump administration and its allies had made no real attempt to explain why blocking the order would harm the government. Instead, the administration argued only that federal agencies must be allowed to take more steps toward realizing the EO before courts should be allowed to rule on its legality. 

“With respect to the public interest, Defendants and Intervenor-Defendants have notably declined to argue that enjoining implementation of the EO will jeopardize the integrity of mail-in voting. The record is devoid of any evidentiary support of illegal or fraudulent absentee voting,” Talwani wrote. “Accordingly, the court lacks any support for the assertion that preliminarily enjoining the USPS… will harm the public.”

This report has been updated.

Adeline Tolle and Maya Bodinson contributed to this report.