A federal judge blocked the US Postal Service from carrying out its plan for President Donald Trump’s mail ballot executive order, finding that the proposal violated a settlement in a 2020 lawsuit against the agency.
Trump had directed USPS to only transmit ballots for states that submit to the agency lists of their mail-in voters and that meet other requirements for their mail voting programs. Previously, a judge in Boston had halted the Postal Service from implementing the order for two-dozen states that challenged it in court. But the new ruling from US District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who sits in Washington DC, blocks the directives nationwide.
If courts let Trump’s order from March 2026 stand, it would give the federal government an unprecedented role in elections — and could put even more voter data in the hands of Trump officials searching for supposed election fraud.
Sullivan’s order stems from a lawsuit the NAACP originally brought against the Postal Service in 2020 because of policy changes that slowed mail delivery as the pandemic election was approaching. A 2021 settlement required the agency to publish guidance documents detailing how it would prioritize “the monitoring and timely delivery of Election Mail.” Part of the settlement gave the court authority to oversee USPS’ actions on this issue.
