Key facts
- A federal judge blocked President Donald Trump's executive order imposing new restrictions on mail-in voting.
- The order directed the creation of a nationwide list of verified U.S. citizens and gave the U.S. Postal Service authority over mail-in ballots.
- The judge ruled that the president did not have the constitutional authority to regulate state elections.
- The injunction specifically prevents the federal government from enforcing these provisions against 24 suing jurisdictions for the upcoming November elections.
- This ruling is one of several judicial challenges to Trump's efforts to exert federal control over elections.
A federal judge in Boston has blocked key provisions of President Donald Trump's executive order that aimed to impose new restrictions on mail-in voting in federal elections. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani declared the order unlawful, specifically preventing the Trump administration from enforcing it for the upcoming November midterm elections in two dozen Democrat-led states and local jurisdictions that filed a lawsuit.
The 37-page ruling concluded that the president did not possess the constitutional authority to regulate state elections as attempted in a March executive order. This order had directed the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to create a nationwide list of verified adult citizens eligible to vote, and it called for the U.S. Postal Service to establish a system to handle mail-in ballots only from voters on preapproved lists.
Talwani stated that the federal government could not use the postal system to regulate who receives ballots, noting that no law enacted by Congress delegates such authority to the USPS. The injunction applies only to this year's elections, as Talwani granted the administration's motion to dismiss challenges related to future elections as not yet ripe.
This decision marks another instance of judicial rebukes to Trump's attempts to assert federal control over American elections, a domain primarily left to Congress and the states by the Constitution. The executive order was the second of its kind; the first, issued in March 2025, sought to require proof of citizenship for voter registration and restrict states from accepting mail-in ballots after Election Day, with federal courts having already blocked major portions of it.