This week at Democracy Docket: A resounding win for voters — and defeat for Trump. But the fight for mail voting isn’t over

With less than 60 days until Election Day, the fight against President Donald Trump’s crusade to restrict voting is reaching a defining moment.

This week, we’ve focused intensely on the single most important issue that will determine access to the ballot this fall — the battle over Trump’s anti-mail voting order.

On Thursday, Democracy Docket National Reporter Jim Saksa was in a federal courtroom in Boston for a pivotal hearing where a judge weighed whether to block the U.S. Postal Service from implementing the order for the midterms. 

Jim sent a steady stream of live updates for our blog, recorded videos for our social channels, and filed a comprehensive report on all the action — which made clear that things did not go well for Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ).

A day later, in a resounding win for voting rights, Judge Indira Talwani barred USPS from moving forward with the order ahead of the election. 

For Talwani, it wasn’t a close call.

“[T]he court finds, on one side, that immediate implementation of the Final Rule issued less than seventy days before the November 2026 election threatens disenfranchisement of millions of United States citizens who seek to vote by mail,” she wrote. “[A]nd, on the other side, that the record includes no evidence relating to fraudulent mail voting to support the rushed implementation of the Final Rule.”

Of course, that’s not the end of the story. Within hours of the ruling, DOJ had appealed it to the First Circuit, Alexandra Hutzler reported. The department could also ask the U.S. Supreme Court to step in at any time – and it looks increasingly like that’s who will have the final say.

In other news on Trump’s order, Jacob Knutson reported that, according to Democrats, the USPS inspector general has opened a probe into whistleblower allegations that this week badly damaged the government’s case that the order can be implemented smoothly in time for voting.

The whistleblower described the Postal Service’s new process for verifying mail ballots as “rushed” and “secretive,” alleging that it could result in tens of thousands of mail ballots never being delivered to legitimate voters. 

As Yunior Rivas noted, the claims quickly appeared as evidence in several of the challenges to the order. And DOJ still hasn’t denied them in court, Yunior added.

There was other good news for voters. As Yunior and Jen Rice reported, Missouri’s Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Thursday that the state’s GOP-backed gerrymander can’t go into effect until approved by voters. And it ordered that a referendum on the map — which GOP officials had tried to quash — be placed on the November ballot.

The GOP map would give their party an extra seat in Congress, at the expense of Kansas City’s Black voters.

On Saturday, as Brentin Mock wrote, Republicans asked SCOTUS to intervene to block that decision and revive the gerrymander for the midterms. For good measure, they also filed a separate lawsuit to restore the gerrymander.

Meanwhile, as Matt Cohen reported, Maryland’s Supreme Court found Thursday that a Democratic redistricting plan can appear on the November ballot, rejecting a GOP bid to derail it. If approved by voters, the plan would allow for a new map giving Democrats an extra congressional seat in 2028, in order to counter the slew of Trump-driven GOP gerrymanders elsewhere.

Finally, in a case that’s flown a little under the radar, an appeals court panel Friday rejected the Trump administration’s bid to immediately revive the use of a sweeping immigration database to check voter rolls,

That means the Department of Homeland Security will remain blocked from using its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system to help states purge their rolls, while the appeal proceeds.

SAVE has wrongly flagged some naturalized citizens as non-citizens, leading to their registrations being canceled.

At Democracy Docket, we’re gearing up for a hectic, high-stakes run-in to the midterms — and we expect you are too. But there are reasons to hope that Trump’s effort to undermine a fair vote is going to come up short.