talwani

A federal judge again Friday blocked the U.S. Postal Service from enacting President Trump’s sweeping new mail ballot rules for the November election, finding that the Postal Service lacks such authority over elections and that neither it nor states such as California are capable of implementing the changes without causing chaos and disenfranchising voters.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani noted that election officials from across the country told the court that it is “likely impossible” to comply with the rules, which “makes disenfranchisement more than likely, if not probable” if the Postal Service were to proceed with them.

Talwani’s order — her latest of several halting the plan since this summer — came after a Postal Service whistleblower alleged the agency’s new computer systems for the project are fundamentally flawed; a top Postal Service official acknowledged a key online portal was unfinished; and the Trump administration filed an emergency petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to allow the plans to proceed anyway.

All this unfolded this week as some of the first mail ballots of the election cycle started going out.

The new rules — which Trump required in a March executive order — would require states to submit complete voter lists to the Postal Service and to adopt new ballot envelopes with individualized voter bar codes designed by the Postal Service, and empower the Postal Service to reject any mail ballots that don’t match those lists.

Trump’s executive order also required the Department of Homeland Security to develop its own lists of eligible citizen voters, ostensibly to be compared against the state lists.

Trump has said the changes are necessary to combat widespread voter fraud, including by non-citizens, though independent election experts say there is no evidence that such fraud exists in large numbers.

Leading Democrats and elections officials in California and other states say the new rules constitute an unlawful federal overreach into state-run elections and a thinly veiled effort by the Trump administration to suppress the vote in a midterm election the GOP is poised to lose.

Talwani, an appointee of President Obama, agreed, finding that the states and voting rights groups are likely to succeed in their claims that the U.S. Constitution reserves the right to regulate elections to the states and Congress — not the executive branch.

Talwani issued her order after holding a contentious hearing in federal court in Boston on Thursday, where she questioned the Postal Service and the dozen conservative-led states supporting it on their ability to implement the changes in time for the Nov. 3 elections. She also heard from California, other liberal-led states and voting rights groups that it would be impossible.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, whose office is helping lead the states’ challenge, hailed Talwani’s order as a crucial reprieve.

“We’ve now secured longer-term relief that will keep the USPS changes blocked while our case moves forward,” Bonta said in a statement to The Times. “We will continue to take all steps to stop the Trump Administration from trampling on voting rights and restricting mail voting.”

Bonta’s office also criticized Department of Justice attorneys for rushing to the Supreme Court before Talwani could issue her order or the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals could weigh in on an appeal the department had already filed on the matter.

Walter Garcia, a Bonta spokesman, said the Justice Department had “flouted standard procedural rules” by approaching the high court before the lower courts had weighed in, despite the fact that the Postal Service acknowledged Thursday that it was not ready to launch its new portal.

“It defies common sense that they would seek emergency relief from the U.S. Supreme Court when USPS is unprepared to implement the rule now,” Garcia said.

State law requires that all registered voters be sent a ballot in the mail, and more than 80% of California voters have used those ballots to vote in recent elections.

In its emergency petition to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration argued that an earlier temporary restraining order by Talwani to halt the new rules from taking effect was “baseless” and would cause “serious irreparable harm” to the federal government, states and voting public.

“To forestall those harms and protect the public interest, this Court should grant an immediate stay, making clear to States that they should begin efforts to comply if they have not done so already,” wrote Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer.

The swirl of litigation has created uncertainty around the Nov. 3 election. It also reflects the Trump administration’s desperate race to get the lower court orders lifted and the new rules implemented in time for that election — the rushed nature of which was a prime focus of the whistleblower.

The unidentified Postal Service employee alleged in a statement released Tuesday by congressional Democrats and submitted in court by Bonta’s office that the agency has been rushing to implement the changes — in defiance of an earlier court order — using “an entirely new and untested set of IT systems” that could cause “catastrophic problems” and disenfranchise millions of voters nationwide.

The Postal Service in a statement Friday said that while its system was developed on an “accelerated schedule,” quality and security standards “were not compromised,” and the agency stands behind “both the rigor of our process and the resulting system.”

At Thursday’s hearing, Talwani appeared frustrated when a Justice Department attorney was unable to tell her the status of the portal.

In a subsequent declaration hours later, Steven W. Monteith, the Postal Service’s chief customer and marketing officer, said officials were still making “refinements” to the portal, but anticipated being able to make it available “for voluntary use by sometime next week.”

Talwani previously issued an order blocking the Postal Service changes from being implemented in California and more than 20 other suing states in June. The Trump administration appealed that decision to the 1st Circuit, which declined to lift it, and then on an emergency basis to the U.S. Supreme Court. In early August, Talwani issued a second ruling for the League of Women Voters and other voting rights groups, blocking the changes nationwide.

On Aug. 24, the Supreme Court set aside Talwani’s order in the states’ case, finding that the states’ challenge was essentially premature because the Postal Service had yet to formally initiate the changes or require state compliance. However, the court explicitly noted that it was not reaching any conclusions as to the legality of the pending rules themselves. “On that score, time will tell,” it said.

The states and voting rights groups promptly filed new lawsuits challenging the legality of the rules, which the Postal Service formally issued Aug. 21. And it is in those cases that Talwani issued her ruling Friday.

She wrote that the voting rights groups had standing to challenge the Postal Service rules nationwide in part because the “chaos” created by the rules’ stiff deadlines significantly interfered with their mission to provide voters with accurate and reliable information about how to vote — and whether to use mail ballots to do so.

David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, said in remarks prior to Talwani’s Friday order that he was “very, very confident” that the Postal Service changes will be blocked for the upcoming elections, and that “mail voting is going to go forward as conveniently and securely as it always has.”

That’s in part because election officials nationwide are “telling the courts that even if they wanted to, they could not implement it,” he said — including in a legal filing Becker helped nearly 100 local elections officials from red and blue states file in separate litigation challenging the rules.

Sept. 3, 2026 9 AM PT

BOSTON — A federal judge in Boston said Thursday the U.S. Postal Service has told her nothing about how it would implement a plan to regulate mail ballots for the midterms as she considers whether to let the plan proceed in the weeks before Election Day.

U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani is deciding whether to extend her prohibition on the proposed regulation of mail ballots, an effort undertaken as part of an executive order by President Trump. The hearing in the closely watched case came a day before the first state begins sending mail ballots to voters.

“We are 70 days from the election and I have nothing from the USPS about how this will happen,” Talwani told Michael Velchik, the Justice Department lawyer representing the Postal Service.

Last week, Talwani imposed a 14-day temporary restraining order to keep it from being used. That order expires next week as more states begin sending out mail ballots. Velchik said the administration will most likely go to the Supreme Court by the end of the week to seek permission to resume implementing the plan.

Talwani has been here before. In June, she prohibited the administration from implementing Trump’s order for the November election, ruling the changes came too close to voting for the federal government to embark on such a project.

But the Supreme Court late last month ruled that Talwani’s order was premature because the Postal Service had not yet published regulations governing how it would apply Trump’s order. The agency did so just before the high court ruling came down, prompting Democrats and voting rights groups to swiftly re-file their lawsuits.

They counter that the president has no authority to set election rules, which is a power designated in the Constitution to the states and in some cases Congress.

They won an initial victory with Talwani’s restraining order, which has already been appealed by the administration.

Trump has long opposed mail voting and falsely blamed it for his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden, even though he often uses that method to cast his own ballot.

Election officials say there’s simply no way they can comply with the Postal Service directives, which could require a complete overhaul of their operations. Before it delivers mail ballots for any state, the Postal Service would have to approve the design of the envelopes that contain them and have the state upload a list of voters receiving them to an online portal.

Some ballots have already gone out. A few municipalities in Wisconsin opted to send mail ballots to voters earlier this week, but Friday marks the full kickoff of voting as North Carolina starts shipping its mail ballots to all voters who requested them.

The administration has contended the changes are relatively minor and legal. But the portal was still not active this week, and most election offices have already printed their envelopes and ballots.

Velchik told Talwani that the federal government is offering states the choice to opt into the system. But the Postal Service has yet to identify a single state that has done so.

A whistleblower report made public this week warns that the postal system’s requirements could lead to millions of mail ballots never being sent. The new rule requires all ballots to be physically brought to post offices before being mailed to voters, but if a single one’s bar code registers an error, the whole batch gets thrown out, even if it contains tens of thousands of legitimate ballots.

Riccardi and Casey write for the Associated Press. Riccardi reported from Denver.

The U.S. Postal Service is poised to launch a hastily built, error-riddled computer system that could jeopardize the process of mail voting relied upon by one-third of all voters, according to a whistleblower statement released Tuesday by Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal.

The effort is part of the implementation of President Trump’s executive order limiting mail voting and has been temporarily halted by a federal judge. The ruling is being appealed by the administration and the directive may ultimately end up back before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The disclosure from the unidentified whistleblower contends that the Postal Service has been scrambling to try to build a complex system that would normally take a year or more in only three months, sometimes in defiance of the judge’s orders halting work. The goal is to have it ready for use in the midterm elections.

The disclosure contends that, due to the new procedures, a single scanning error in a batch of tens of thousands of ballot envelopes could prevent any from reaching voters. It details a system that election officials have already warned could not be implemented before the first mail ballots begin going out Friday in North Carolina.

“The Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans,” Blumenthal told reporters in advance of releasing the whistleblower information. “This administration seems hell-bent on changing the framework on casting ballots in this country clearly for political reasons.”

Executive order is subject to furious court action with midterms nearing

Trump’s executive order, signed in March, directed U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the commissioner of the Social Security Administration to develop state citizenship lists and then required the Postal Service to send mail ballots only to voters who are on such a list. Ballot envelopes would have to comply with new Postal Service rules and include bar codes.

The online portal that is the subject of the whistleblower complaint is intended for states to deliver their lists of verified voters to the Postal Service.

The Postal Service did not comment on Monday night. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday. The White House has called the mail voting provisions “commonsense measures” necessary to combat fraud.

Trump has long opposed voting by mail, even though he has repeatedly used the method to cast his own ballot. He falsely blamed mail voting for his 2020 election loss and has spent years spreading conspiracy theories about it. A report by the Brookings Institution published in 2025 found that mail voting fraud occurred in only about four cases out of every 10 million mail ballots cast.

Since returning to office, Trump has said Republicans should be “taking over” vote counting in Democratic areas and launched a sweeping attempt to reinvestigate the 2020 election, despite a mountain of evidence that he lost fairly to Democrat Joe Biden.

Until Trump came out against mail voting in 2020, the system was used equally by both parties. Since then, it has become more common among Democratic voters. More than 29% of all voters in 2024 cast their ballots through the mail.

After Trump issued his executive order, Democrats and civil rights groups sued and eventually won a ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani in Boston barring implementation of the system before the November midterms. But without ruling on the legality of Trump’s order, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority last week found that was premature and overruled Talwani, momentarily clearing the way for its implementation.

On the night of Aug. 21, the Postal Service released a final rule outlining how it would implement the order.

It said it would only send mail ballots for states that got approval for the design of their envelopes and submitted a list of voters receiving them through the still-not-active online portal. That rule gave plaintiffs a chance to sue again, and Talwani on Thursday night issued a 14-day restraining order against implementation of the measure.

Whistleblower complaint says portal development is rushed and sloppy

The letter from Blumenthal and an accompanying summary of the whistleblower’s statements says the Postal Service began work on the portal on June 15 and stopped on June 25 after Talwani’s initial order. Then on July 29, the Postal Service restarted the work. That was when the administration appealed the judge’s order to the Supreme Court. The high court did not strike Talwani’s injunction down until Aug. 24.

Talwani last week found the Postal Service violated her order by continuing to work on the final rule, but she imposed no sanctions on the government. On Monday, she issued a ruling refusing to lift the restraining order that also said the Postal Service could continue work on its portal, as long as it wasn’t forcing states to use it.

In its summary of the whistleblower’s statement, the group Whistleblower Aid says the hurried construction of the portal, with a goal of being active on Tuesday, meant it did not undergo full testing.

“The apparently sloppy and rushed manner in which the Federal Ballot Mail Portal and supporting IT systems are being built poses significant risk,” the group wrote. “Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all.”

The statement also says the Postal Service is implementing a “zero percent” rule in which any errors in any mail ballots sent out by an election office could lead to all of them being discarded — even if it’s simply one problem amid tens of thousands of legitimate ballots.

The rule requires ballots to be handled in a physical post office by an election official. Those will then be scanned to ensure they match the voter database. During three layers of checks, a single apparent error could cause the whole batch to be rejected, the statement says.

Blumenthal said he has “a very strong hope and some faith that our system of justice will strike down this unconstitutional and unconscionable rule.” But, he added, if it somehow goes into effect for the midterms, he would not advise voting by mail.

Riccardi writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Lindsay Whitehurst contributed to this story.

A federal judge on Wednesday lifted a major obstacle to President Trump’s executive order limiting mail voting, even as Democratic state officials filed a new court challenge with the midterm elections fast approaching.

The fresh round of legal wrangling comes just two days after the Supreme Court handed down a procedural ruling in Trump’s favor, and could mean the issue lands before the high court again before the pivotal contests for control of Congress. The first mailed ballots are set to be sent out next week.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston agreed to lift an order prohibiting the U.S. Postal Service from carrying out Trump’s order for November’s elections. She wrote that she was “compelled” to do so after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled that a similar injunction she granted in a separate case was premature.

Talwani nevertheless said the executive order could unleash “chaos” and referred to it as “likely unconstitutional.”

The administration can now move forward and implement a Postal Service rule published late Friday. It would require states to follow a uniform envelope style for mail ballots and to give the Postal Service a list of voters eligible to receive them. Talwani found on Tuesday that the rule’s issuance technically violated her injunction, but she declined to penalize the administration.

The new lawsuit, filed by about two dozen Democratically controlled states against the U.S. Postal Service, marked a new phase in the high-stakes litigation creating confusion around the midterm elections.

It came after the Supreme Court ruled against them in a separate case, but did not say Trump’s order was legal.

The high court majority found the initial Democratic lawsuit was premature, but that was before the Republican administration issued a rule governing Postal Service delivery of mail ballots. Election officials warn it will be impossible to implement before the first wave of mail ballots are sent out next week.

“Across the country, states are already deep into preparations for the 2026 elections. Now, at the last moment, the federal government is attempting to meddle in those preparations and potentially threaten countless Americans’ right to vote,” New York Attorney General Letitia James, one of 25 Democratic attorneys general filing the lawsuit, said in a statement. “USPS has no authority to decide who can and cannot vote by mail.”

The Trump administration plan faces a third lawsuit originally filed in May in the nation’s capital, though judges there have so far declined to block it.

All previous challenges were filed before the administration published its mail ballot rule Friday night.

White House spokesperson Lauren Bis on Wednesday said the Postal Service’s proposals were “commonsense measures that protect the security of mail-in ballots” and that the administration would continue to work to implement them to boost “the safety and security of our elections.”

The Postal Service said it would not comment because of the pending lawsuit.

National Democrats on Tuesday cited the rule in asking the federal judge in the Washington case to block Trump’s order after he declined to do so last spring, saying the administration at the time had not taken concrete action. In Boston, Talwani also found that the administration had violated a separate injunction she had placed on the Postal Service in drafting the new rule, although she did not take any action against the government.

Talwani had issued the injunction against Trump’s executive order in the prior Democratic state case, which is the one the Supreme Court overturned on Monday. She also issued a second injunction Aug. 11 in a case filed by the League of Women Voters and other voting rights groups, while the Supreme Court was considering the administration’s appeal of the judge’s first order.

Trump has long targeted mail voting, which he falsely blames for his 2020 election loss and is disproportionately used by Democrats as a result of Trump’s condemnations. Since returning to power, Trump has tried to claim authority over election rules, saying he thinks Republicans should “take over” vote counting in Democratic areas.

He issued his first election executive order just months after retaking office, attempting to require documentary proof of citizenship to vote, among other changes. He has also been pushing a sweeping election bill that has stalled in the Senate amid opposition from Democrats and even some within his own party.

Riccardi and Whitehurst write for the Associated Press.