The Postal Service issued its mail ballot rule on Friday night while a court order blocking it was still in force

The Postal Service issued a final rule governing mail-in and absentee ballots on Friday evening, while a federal court order barring it from putting that rule into effect for the November 3 election was still in force. On Sunday, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani gave the government until 8 a.m. Tuesday to answer the voting rights groups that had asked her to enforce her own injunction.

Talwani entered a preliminary injunction on August 11 in a suit brought by eight organizations, among them the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts, the League of Women Voters of the United States, the Association of Americans Resident Overseas, OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates, the U.S. Vote Foundation and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. Her order on Sunday sets out what happened next. “Defendants did not file an appeal and did not seek, let alone obtain, a stay of the preliminary injunction,” she wrote. “Nonetheless, on August 21, 2026, USPS issued its Final Rule, with an anticipated publication date in the Federal Register of August 26, 2026.”

The plaintiffs filed an emergency motion to enforce the injunction on Saturday, attaching the final rule as an exhibit. The government responded the following day, opposing expedited briefing and objecting to having “only two business days to respond.” Talwani wrote that the Postal Service had created the emergency “by issuing a rule on a Friday evening after the courts were closed,” and that the government’s response ignored “the confusion that the publication will engender.”

She offered the government a choice. It can file by 8 a.m. on August 25, which she wrote would allow “this court one business day to address Plaintiffs’ pending motion before the August 26, 2026 publication date.” Or it can have until 11:59 p.m. on August 27, with “entry of a Temporary Restraining Order staying publication of the Final Rule.”

The rule carries out Section 3 of Executive Order 14399, which President Donald Trump signed on March 31 and which was published in the Federal Register on April 3. Section 3 directs the Postmaster General to open a rulemaking specifying that “the USPS shall not transmit mail-in or absentee ballots from any individual unless those individuals have been enrolled on a State-specific list.” It also calls for a uniquely serialized Intelligent Mail barcode on every outbound and return ballot envelope, and requires that any final rule “be issued no later than 120 days from the date of this order,” a deadline that fell on July 29.

The Postal Service published its proposed rule on June 2 and took comments until July 2. In it the agency said states “would retain full control over who would (or would not) be able to vote by mail in federal elections within each state,” and that it “would not verify whether individuals should or should not be included on a State’s Mail-In and Absentee Participation List.” The agency described the lists as a law enforcement tool that would “allow law enforcement officials to compare the total number of mailed ballots to the total number of received ballots to detect potential issues meriting further investigation.” The standards would not apply to primary elections or to ballots covered by the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act.

On July 17 the Postal Service published a Privacy Act notice creating a new system of records to hold voters’ names, addresses and ballot envelope barcodes. That notice states: “The proposal to amend the DMM is the subject of active litigation, including two injunctions that are currently being appealed. The Postal Service will not publish a final rule unless and until the government obtains relief from all relevant injunctions.” The same notice says that if no final rule issues, “then this System of Record will not take effect.”

No relief has been granted. Two applications for a stay are pending on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket, both arising from a parallel suit brought by California and other states in which Talwani blocked key provisions of the order on June 25 as to the 23 states and the District of Columbia that sued. The Trump administration filed the first on July 27 and twelve states led by Alabama filed the second on July 29, both submitted to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who requested responses. Those responses were filed on August 3, along with twelve amicus briefs including ones from 56 former judges, a group of bipartisan former governors, and state and local election officials. Both sides filed supplemental briefs on August 12. The Court’s docket shows no order.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer has argued that there is not enough time to obtain ordinary appellate relief before the election. Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia filed a 45-page opposition arguing that a stay would let the federal government “rush out an unprecedented, legally indefensible voter-verification and ballot-interception program,” according to SCOTUSblog, which also reported that the First Circuit declined to pause Talwani’s June order before the administration went to the Supreme Court.

Votebeat reported that the August 11 order reached the whole country rather than only the 24 jurisdictions covered in June. In that opinion, as reported by Democracy Docket, Talwani wrote that “throughout the multiple actions before district courts, courts of appeal, and the Supreme Court of the United States, the federal government has declined to defend the constitutionality of the EO’s directives,” and that “the record is devoid of any evidentiary support of illegal or fraudulent absentee voting.”

Talwani’s Sunday order describes that August 11 injunction as limiting implementation of the rule “to elections after the November 3, 2026 election,” which she wrote would ensure “orderly review of Defendants’ then-anticipated Final Rule after it was issued” and avoid “the confusion that would be caused by emergency review of a Final Rule with less than 90 days before the election.” The general election is 71 days away.