(CNN) — The Supreme Court on Monday permitted President Donald Trump to move forward with a controversial executive order targeting mail ballots, but the decision will almost certainly not be the final word in whether the administration can actually implement its far-reaching plan.
At the center of the dispute is an executive order Trump signed in March that gives the US Postal Service an unprecedented role in deciding whether to send mail ballots — a move that has followed years of the president making baseless claims about illegal voting by mail.
But the Supreme Court’s order, which came over the dissent of three liberal justices, doesn’t resolve the legality of Trump’s proposal. The president’s plan for the USPS remains blocked on a nationwide basis. And further court action is almost certain to put Trump’s executive order before the justices again, potentially within a few days. Overnight, the Trump administration asked a lower court to clear another hurdle still blocking implementation of the president’s USPS directives.
For now, no voters who expect to cast their ballots by mail in the midterm elections need to change their plans. Still, the high court’s decision handed the president a procedural win on an issue that has been central to his messaging for years. And it is likely to inject uncertainty for both voters and state election officials who are scrambling to prepare for this year’s high profile midterm elections.
What the Supreme Court ruled on mail ballots
The court’s decision Monday didn’t deal with the legality of Trump’s executive order but rather with the timing of a lawsuit filed by 23 Democratic states that challenged it. The court’s conservatives concluded that the lawsuit had been filed too soon because the Trump administration hadn’t yet taken any steps to actually implement its plans.
“The executive order makes no demand of the states,” the high court wrote in an unsigned decision that did not disclose the vote count. To pause the order, the court wrote, lower courts had to “speculate” about the potential harm that would be inflicted on the states that sued.
The decision on Monday, the court said, doesn’t mean the president will ultimately be able to implement the provision of the executive order that dealt with USPS.
“On that score,” the court wrote, “time will tell.”
Trump did score a cleaner win on another section of his executive order. The Department of Homeland Security will be allowed to move forward with a plan to create lists of voters for each state that it has deemed are US citizens and therefore eligible to vote. But Trump’s plan doesn’t require individual states to do anything with those lists.
What happens next
Trump’s emergency appeal at the Supreme Court had been pending for nearly a month, an unusually long time. In that span, the on-the-ground dispute over mail ballots has moved far beyond the case the high court decided on Monday.
One of the Justice Department’s main arguments for why the states filed their challenge prematurely was that the US Postal Service had not yet formally adopted a required regulation spelling out how it would implement the president’s plan. While the case was pending at the court, the USPS issued that regulation — offering more clarity about how it intended to carry out the executive order.
Meanwhile, the same federal district court in Massachusetts that had shut down Trump’s USPS plan in the challenge filed by the Democratic states issued another ruling in a separate case from voting rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union. In that ruling, Judge Indira Talwani, nominated to the bench by President Barack Obama, issued a ruling that blocked the USPS directives nationwide.
That separate ruling is still in effect. And that is why, despite the Supreme Court decision on Monday, the president’s USPS order remains blocked. In a court filing late Monday, the Justice Department told Talwani it would appeal her order keeping the USPS mandates on hold unless she wiped it away herself by late Tuesday afternoon. The ACLU and the other voter advocacy groups suing the administration over the order said they would respond Tuesday.
What the Supreme Court decision means for voters
Because of the ongoing legal maneuvering, it’s not yet clear that the Supreme Court’s decision on Monday will mean anything for this year’s midterm elections. Under the Constitution, states and Congress determine voting procedures, not the White House or federal agencies — a point that will almost certainly be raised at a later stage of the case.
That said, for both Trump and the groups challenging him, time is of the essence.
If federal courts attempt to shut down Trump’s executive order closer to November, they are likely to run headlong into a wonky judicial doctrine known as the “Purcell principle.” Rooted in a 2006 Supreme Court decision, the principle warns federal courts at all levels against making last-minute changes to voting rules. If the litigation drags out, the Justice Department is almost certain to argue that it’s too late for courts to intervene to stop the administration before this year’s midterm.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, writing in dissent on Monday, warned that the administration might be able to “game the system.”
“The court has held for a while now that even valid election-related legal claims can come too late,” Jackson, the court’s junior liberal, wrote on Monday. “Today’s revelation is that such claims can also come too early — never mind that an election is looming and related harms are presently occurring.”
The November 3 election is less than 80 days away.
What Trump’s order would do
The president’s March executive order set two major changes in motion.
First, it directed DHS to build state-by-state citizenship lists using federal databases, including Social Security data and immigration records. The goal: Identify who may be eligible to vote in federal elections and give states data to compare with their voter rolls. For now, the Supreme Court’s decision allows that effort to move forward.
Second, it ordered the Postal Service to change how it manages mail-ballot delivery.
Under a final rule published by USPS last week, state and local election officials would have to upload the names and addresses of every mail-ballot recipient to a Postal Service portal before the ballots are sent to voters. They would also have to adopt standardized envelopes and unique, machine-readable barcodes.
Ballots not added to the portal would be rejected and returned to election officials. States that refuse to comply would lose USPS ballot-delivery services for federal general elections.
That data would become a kind of ballot “manifest” used to flag anomalies — and would be shared with federal law enforcement and election officials for audits and investigations. DHS and the Justice Department could then use it to investigate suspected unlawful voting, an effort this administration has backed with the weight of the federal government for the past 18 months.
But there’s a crucial caveat: USPS says it won’t implement the rule before the midterms — or at all — without federal court approval. The White House has made clear it wants the system in place for the November elections.
More than 20 states, Democratic Party leaders and nonpartisan voting-rights groups have sued to stop the administration, arguing that the Constitution does not give Trump the unilateral power to change how states carry out their mail voting programs.
Election officials, including some Republicans, warn the policy could vastly expand the roles of USPS and DHS in running elections, create major logistical problems and fuel voter confusion. They fear the resulting turmoil could give Trump and his allies fresh grounds to challenge the results.
“USPS is no longer merely a carrier of ballots; it is instead transformed into a gatekeeper of voter eligibility,” lawyers challenging the order wrote in one case.
USPS downplayed those concerns after receiving more than 200,000 public comments, including warnings about disenfranchisement, errors and confusion.
“Despite any logistical or financial difficulties states may face complying with the rule, including some claims that immediate implementation would prove impossible, the visibility and law-enforcement benefits of the rule, including for this election cycle, are such that there is no compelling reason for any delay,” the agency wrote in its final rule.
This article has been updated with additional developments.
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