The president wants the Post Office to decide who gets to vote. Two federal judges just said no.

"The Proposed Rule violates paragraph 2 of the Agreement because the Postal Service cannot post documents reflecting practices and policies for prioritizing the monitoring and timely delivery of Election Mail if its policies provide that it will not accept noncompliant mailing and therefore will not deliver mail-in or absentee ballots to some voters."

— U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, July 1, 2026

In March, Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the U.S. Postal Service to become the gatekeeper of American elections. The plan was elegant in its simplicity: the Post Office would only deliver mail-in ballots for voters who appeared on federal preapproved lists. States that refused to hand over their voter rolls to the government would find their ballots left undelivered. The Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration were ordered to build a nationwide database of verified U.S. citizens over 18. Individual barcodes would be required on every ballot envelope for federal tracking.

It was the most ambitious effort to federalize American elections since Reconstruction.

Translation: Trump was trying to turn the mail system into a voter suppression engine, with the federal government deciding which ballots reached mailboxes and which did not.

Two federal judges have now blocked the scheme from separate angles, creating a pincer movement that has left the Trump administration scrambling for an appeal strategy with only four months until Election Day.

The first ruling came on June 25 from U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Massachusetts. In a 37-page opinion, she concluded that the president had no constitutional authority to regulate state elections through the Postal Service. No law enacted by Congress delegates authority to control mail-in voting to the USPS, she wrote. Her injunction covers 24 jurisdictions, including Arizona, California, Michigan, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, effectively shielding the most competitive electoral battlegrounds.

Then came the second hammer blow on July 1. Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington, D.C., ruled that the Postal Service's proposed rules violated a 2021 settlement with the NAACP requiring the agency to prioritize the monitoring and timely delivery of election mail. Sullivan's decision applies nationwide, not just to the states that sued. The Postal Service literally cannot implement the order anywhere without breaking a court-supervised agreement.

Dave Aronberg, the former state attorney for Palm Beach County, Florida, called the Sullivan ruling a "massive precedent" on the Legal AF podcast. He said the case establishes that federal courts will aggressively monitor the rules Trump puts forward to ensure they do not violate constitutional rights to vote.

The NAACP connection matters. In 2020, the postal agency under Trump's first administration made policy changes that slowed mail delivery as the pandemic election approached. The NAACP sued. The settlement that emerged in 2021 required the USPS to publish guidance on prioritizing election mail, and it explicitly extended at least through the 2028 election cycle. The settlement also gave the court ongoing authority to oversee the agency's actions.

Sullivan wrote that Trump's order was designed to exert federal control over who in the United States may be sent a mail-in or absentee ballot in federal elections by the Postal Service. The proposed rules would have refused delivery to any ballot deemed noncompliant and would have withheld all ballots from states that declined or failed to certify a voter list.

Anthony Ashton, the NAACP's senior associate general counsel, said the proposed changes would have created unnecessary and unlawful barriers that would disproportionately harm Black voters. He added that mail-in voting reduces voter intimidation at the polls and prevents Election Day dirty tricks.

NAACP President Derrick Johnson called the ruling another major blow to Trump's attempt to rig the election. The President is failing, and the people are winning, he said.

The Trump administration is not conceding. White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said the administration is confident it will ultimately prevail. Federal officials asked Talwani to lift her ban by July 6 and appealed to the First Circuit Court of Appeals. They warned the judge that a two-tiered system, with different rules for different states, would be operationally impossible for the Postal Service.

Steven Monteith, the Postal Service's chief customer and marketing officer, wrote in a court filing that running one set of rules for plaintiff states and another for the remaining states would cause operational confusion and significantly increase the complexity of implementing any final rule.

The subtext was clear: they needed to move fast because time was running out. Federal officials acknowledged that with both Talwani's injunction and Sullivan's nationwide ruling in place, there was effectively no path to implementing the restrictions before November.

The request for a quick decision by Talwani suggests the administration is trying to rush the case to the Supreme Court. That court has already weighed in once: on June 29, it rejected a Republican challenge to states' right to accept mail ballots received after Election Day, dealing another blow to the broader effort to restrict mail voting.

What made the March executive order particularly alarming was not just the ballot restrictions but the surveillance architecture underneath it. The order required DHS and SSA to compile a national database of verified citizens. DHS was directed to draw from federal databases to assemble lists of voting-age citizens in each state. The fear among civil rights groups was that these lists would be used for overly aggressive voter purges, and that the data itself would be vulnerable to the kind of partisan manipulation that has already plagued state-level voter roll challenges.

Judge Talwani asked a question during the hearing that captured the absurdity of the whole enterprise: What's the harm if I say no one can use this list for the November election?

The Trump administration has consistently framed its efforts as an attempt to enforce existing laws barring noncitizens from voting, even though noncitizen voting is extraordinarily rare. The president has repeatedly claimed without evidence that Democrats rig elections, extending the debunked fraud narrative from 2020 into a systematic campaign to restructure the mechanics of voting itself.

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold summed it up plainly after Talwani's ruling: States run elections, not Trump.

The question is not whether Trump wanted to control the election. The question is whether two federal judges and a 2021 settlement with the NAACP were enough to stand in his way.