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A federal judge blocked the Postal Service from carrying out Trump’s plan to make massive changes to mail-in voting.
Some shit you should know before you dig in: Back in March, Trump signed an executive order directing major changes to how elections are run. Under the plan, states would have to hand over lists of their mail-in voters and overhaul how they handle ballots. Any state that refused would see its ballots left sitting undelivered. The order also directed the Department of Homeland Security to build state-by-state rosters of everyone old enough to vote. Trump has spent years insisting mail-in voting invites fraud, while others have accused his administration of seeking to restrict a practice that traditionally benefits Democrats more than Republicans.
What’s going on now: US District Judge Emmet Sullivan, a Clinton appointee based in Washington, on Wednesday barred the Postal Service from enforcing the proposed rule nationwide. Sullivan sided with the NAACP, which argued the changes violated a 2021 settlement requiring USPS to take “extraordinary measures” to keep election mail moving on time all the way through 2028.
In his opinion, Sullivan wrote that the agency couldn’t claim to prioritize timely delivery while also refusing to deliver ballots to some voters and cutting off entire states that decline to certify a voter list.
The ruling lands a week after Boston-based US District Judge Indira Talwani blocked the same executive order, siding with a coalition of Democratic-led states that argued Trump had overstepped his authority on elections, which state and local governments have run since the country’s founding. Talwani’s order covers the roughly two dozen states that sued, while Sullivan’s extends the block nationwide.
NAACP President Derrick Johnson framed the decision as a win against Trump’s election agenda. “The President is failing, and the people are winning,” he said.
Senior NAACP counsel Anthony Ashton said the USPS changes would have created “unnecessary and unlawful barriers” and would have fallen hardest on Black voters, who lean on mail voting more than most.
On the other side, the White House has defended the order as lawful. Spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said last week that Trump is “committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of our elections” and that the administration is “confident that we will ultimately prevail.”
