Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas firmly dissented Monday as the denied a request by President Donald Trump’s administration for relief from a universal injunction against its mail-in ballot rules.
The dissent, which Alito authored and Thomas joined, argued that the plaintiffs in the case were relying on claims that the court had previously identified as weak and unlikely to succeed.
“The Court incorrectly denies the Governments application for a stay of a universal injunction that bars implementation of a final rule concerning election ballot mail,” Alito wrote. “Some of the plaintiffs lack standing, while the remainder are pursuing a claim that this Court has recently called a Hail Mary pass that rarely succeeds.'”
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“The Government has made the showings necessary for a stay, so I respectfully dissent,” he concluded.
The Court’s Monday order went unsigned, but Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurrence that allowed room for a potential Trump victory down the line. He nevertheless argued that it is too close to Election Day to realistically implement the rules for the 2026 midterm elections.
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“In my view, based on the briefing the Court has received at this interim stage, there is at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Services statutory authority,” Kavanaugh wrote. “But applying the rule in the 2026 elections would be arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections.”
Kavanaugh’s concurrence echoes Alito’s dissent in acknowledging the expansive authority the USPS holds to regulate the collection, handling, transportation and delivery of mail.
The Trump rules would require federal ballot mail to be sent in envelopes bearing an election-mail logo, capable of being scanned by high-speed equipment and carrying a barcode unique to each voter.
State and local election officials would also be required to submit envelope designs to the Postal Service for review and upload basic voter information to an online USPS portal.
Under the USPS rule, mailings that failed to comply would not be accepted and would instead be returned to election officials to correct and resubmit.
Fox News’ Stepheny Price and Shannon Bream contributed to this report.
