A federal appeals court on Saturday declined to allow President Trump’s administration to implement his executive order restricting mail-in voting in 23 states and the District of Columbia, upholding a lower court’s block ahead of November elections that will decide control of Congress. The Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the administration’s request to lift an injunction secured by Democratic-led states on June 25 in a 2-1 ruling.
Judge Indira Talwani, a federal district judge in Massachusetts, had concluded that key parts of Trump’s March 2026 executive order were unconstitutional. The appeals court panel agreed that states faced rapidly approaching deadlines to comply with new voting procedures and had no choice but to respond immediately, making the lawsuit timely rather than premature as the Justice Department had argued.
Trump signed the executive order in March after years of calling for tighter rules on voting by mail and pushing the false claim that his 2020 election defeat was the result of widespread voter fraud. The order directed the Department of Homeland Security to compile and transmit to states a list of confirmed U.S. citizens eligible to vote in each state, derived from citizenship and naturalization records and other federal databases.
The order also required the U.S. Postal Service to deliver ballots only to voters on each state’s approved mail-in ballot list, and directed the Department of Justice to prioritize investigation and prosecution of state and local election officials who issue federal ballots to people deemed ineligible to vote. USPS recently moved to implement Trump’s directive by issuing proposed rules requiring states to provide names and barcodes tied to their mail-in ballots.
In her June 25 ruling, Talwani said the president lacked any authority to direct DHS to compile voter eligibility lists for states to use and that USPS had no statutory authorization to adopt binding regulations on mail-in voting. She also found Trump could not attempt “to intimidate local election officials to use the necessarily incomplete confirmed citizenship lists as a resource, lest they face criminal prosecution.”
The appeals court panel pointed out that the Trump administration had repeatedly indicated the DHS voter database could be used to “facilitate post-election law-enforcement activity.” When asked whether the administration would prosecute a state official for sending a ballot to someone not on DHS’s approved voter list, the administration provided no answer, the appeals court noted. “People do not lightly disregard public officers’ thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings against them if they do not come around,” the judges wrote.
The Justice Department warned that absent a ruling in its favor from the appeals court, it may be forced to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene. The ruling represents the latest legal setback for Trump’s broader effort to overhaul elections. He has made winning approval in Congress of a divisive package of voting restrictions called the SAVE America Act a priority, though judges have blocked an earlier executive order requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and restricting the counting of mail ballots.
Sources
- Reuters — reported the appeals court’s 2-1 ruling declining to lift the injunction and the appeals court’s reasoning on state deadlines and implementation timelines
- Democracy Docket — detailed the appeals court’s findings on the USPS envelope costs, the threats to election officials, and the flawed SAVE database system
- The Guardian — confirmed the appeals court’s rejection of the administration’s premature-lawsuit argument and the constitutional issues at stake
