Left: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson appears at “An Evening with Ketanji Brown Jackson” at the Chapman Conference Center on MDC’s Wolfson Campus on March 10, 2025, in Miami, Fla. (Photo by Alberto E. Tamargo/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images). Right: President Donald Trump discusses transgender weightlifters during a commencement address at the University of Alabama on Thursday, May 1, 2025, in Tuscaloosa, Ala. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart).
As President Donald Trump’s bid to exert new control over mail-in voting remains temporarily blocked, the states that persuaded lower courts to halt major parts of his executive order are now urging the U.S. Supreme Court not to revive it.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta led the brief filed Monday afternoon at the request of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, opposing the Trump administration’s emergency request for a stay from the nation’s highest court.
California, joined by attorneys general from Massachusetts, Nevada, Arizona, Connecticut, Maine, Michigan, Washington state, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Vermont, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., asked the justices to keep the injunction intact while the appeal proceeds, arguing that Trump’s “directives” to the U.S. Postal Service “are plainly unlawful.”
“This Court has repeatedly warned about the dangers of altering election rules on the eve of an election. That is exactly what a stay would do here. It would allow the federal government to rush out an unprecedented, legally indefensible voter-verification and ballot-interception program that would, among other things, give the U.S. Postal Service far-reaching new powers and responsibilities,” the states wrote.
The coalition warned that permitting those “transformative changes to take effect so close to this fall’s elections” would create “an intolerable risk” of “disenfranchising a substantial number of voters” in the approaching midterm elections.
“The consequences of allowing such transformative changes to take effect so close to this fall’s elections would be extreme. Because of the high risk of errors and the limited window for correcting mistakes, many of the millions of voters who rely on mail voting — especially voters with disabilities and those in rural areas — would likely be denied mail ballots and, as a result, disenfranchised,” the brief said.
The filing comes one week after the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to pause U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani’s injunction blocking enforcement of Trump’s late-March executive order 14399. The administration described the order as an “extraordinary” measure tied to “election integrity” efforts. Its application followed a 2-1 ruling by the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that left Talwani’s injunction in place.
“[T]he injunction is especially indefensible,” the administration asserted, “because the agencies are still deliberating over how (if at all) to implement the Order[.]”
The states have now answered that this kind of confusion is exactly why a stay is not warranted.
“Many more voters would be confused — either because they wouldn’t receive their mail ballots or would fear that USPS would fail to deliver their voted ballots to state officials for tabulation,” the brief said, adding that the “appropriate judicial response to these serious concerns is to recognize plaintiffs’ challenge as ripe and prevent disruptive changes to election rules ahead of the rapidly approaching midterms — just as the district court did.”
In the event SCOTUS does grant a stay, the states called on the justices to “make clear in its order that neither Purcell nor any other restriction on judicial review would preclude injunctive relief against defendants’ unconstitutional interference with state elections laws before the November elections.”
Talwani previously ruled that Section 3 of Trump’s order, which directed USPS to “refuse to transmit mail ballots for certain voters,” was “unconstitutional.” The judge added that the order “directs the violation of several of obligations imposed on USPS by Congress, including the exhaustive statutory definition of ‘nonmailable matter,’ which does not include ballot mail from unenrolled individuals, and USPS’s obligation not to make ‘any undue or unreasonable discrimination among users of the mails.'”
“The right to vote is a fundamental right, which the Constitution guarantees to all citizens,” Talwani said.
The post Trump’s ‘far-reaching new powers’ for Postal Service pose ‘intolerable risk’ of ‘disenfranchising a substantial number of voters,’ states warn SCOTUS first appeared on Law & Crime.
