What’s next for mail voting after the Supreme Court ruled against Trump

By Jeremy Herb, Tierney Sneed, Gabe Cohen, CNN

(CNN) — Election officials in both Democratic and Republican-led states breathed a sigh of relief when the Supreme Court blocked President Donald Trump’s sweeping restrictions on mail-in balloting Monday, which they had warned would upend vote-by-mail and potentially disenfranchise millions of voters in the midterms.

The decision means the voters can cast ballots by mail as the laws in their state previously allowed. While election officials have been anxious about Trump’s attempts to severely complicate the process, they have spent the last several months assuming — correctly — that courts would intervene to block his proposal, and they’ve focused on making their mail voting programs available as usual.

Still, because of lingering confusion around Trump’s efforts to change the rules, election officials say they’ll likely take extra steps to ensure voters feel comfortable casting ballots by mail.

Under the rules Trump was trying to impose, the US Postal Service would only deliver ballots if their envelopes had unique barcodes for each voter — a requirement some jurisdictions would have struggled to meet, as they had neither the time nor the funding to replace non-compliant materials. He also wanted to require states to provide their mail voter lists to USPS, with the possibility that entire batches of ballots would be rejected by postal workersif just one envelope did not match the voter information submitted with the agency.

Election officials say that voters have been expressing concerns for weeks about using the mail to vote in light of the litigation, but that they’ve encouraged their voters to “put all of the noise aside.”

States move forward with mail voting plans

In court filings leading up to the Supreme Court’s decision, both Republican and Democratic election officials warned that requiring the Trump administration’s proposed changes to mail balloting were unworkable and would have caused major disruptions — if not blocked mail voting in their states altogether.

At the same time, as the litigation wound its way through the courts, most election officials said they were simply keeping their heads down and preparing for the election under the assumption that Trump’s directives would ultimately be blocked by the courts — even in Republican-led states that argued in favor of the changes.

“I’ve been telling people however they like to vote in the past — plan to vote that way this year too,” said Tracy Overstreet, election commissioner in central Nebraska’s Hall County. “Kind of put all the noise aside.”

That work has now proven prudent in light of the Supreme Court’s decision, with ballots already sent out in some states and more going out every day as Election Day draws closer.

Kate Sweeney Bell, the clerk in Marion County, Indiana, which includes Indianapolis, said the Supreme Court’s decision gives election officials finality that they can use to reassure their voters.

“I don’t think that President Trump is done trying to sow more doubt into the outcome of the election,” she said. “But with the decision by the highest court in the land, I think this has been addressed — and that will be part of our message.”

Trump faces setbacks in court

Monday night’s Supreme Court ruling was a capstone of a series of legal setbacks Trump has faced in his efforts to unilaterally change election rules or otherwise give the federal government more control over how local officials carry out voting practices.

A 2025 executive order by the president that sought to boost proof of citizenship requirements for voter registration was blocked by several lower courts.

The Trump administration has also been dealt a wave of defeats in a Justice Department campaign to force states to hand over their unredacted voter registration files, so DOJ can audit them for ineligible voters. The DOJ sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for refusing. All 23 of the district courts to have ruled on the merits of DOJ’s demands have rejected the administration’s arguments (one state reached a settlement in the litigation), and an appeals court has ruled twice against Trump as well.

Trump has had better luck in court cases that do not involve new mandates for state election officials from the government, with the Supreme Court adopting some of his DOJ’s views in high-stakes redistricting disputes for this cycle. And the president might ultimately prevail in his request that the Supreme Court revive an immigrant data program his administration has encouraged states to use to do voluntary reviews of their voter rolls for non-citizens.

“All of the things we’re going to hear between now and November 3 are noise intended by the administration to create an impression of chaos and confusion that is false,” said David Becker, who heads the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “Those efforts are failing. We’re seeing it in high turnout in the primaries. We’re seeing it in the very secure and excellent election administration that we’ve seen in the primaries. And we’ll continue to see that.”

Lingering alarm and confusion among voters

Local election officials say the race is on now to ensure their voters are confident they can cast their ballots through the mail.

Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said he has spent recent weeks trying to dispel misconceptions about mail voting. The questions intensified after the Supreme Court initially allowed the administration to move ahead with its mail-ballot rulemaking last month, before blocking implementation of the rules for the midterms this week.

“People were coming up to me saying, ‘Oh, what are you going to do? There’s no vote by mail,’” Hobbs said. “I said, ‘No, it’s still going on.’”

Marybeth Kuznik, director of elections in southwestern Pennsylvania’s Fayette County, said that she had a voter come to her office to sign up for a mail ballot Tuesday who had incorrectly believed they weren’t allowed before Monday’s Supreme Court ruling.

“My job here is to get the word out to my voters that nothing has changed, and yes, they can vote by mail if that’s how they’d like to — and we’ll do everything we can as we always do,” Kuznik said.

Michigan has launched a “Cast with Confidence” campaign to reassure voters that they can cast ballots as they choose in November. Deputy Secretary of State Aghogho Edevbie is traveling the state to meet with voters and local election officials and combat confusion over voting options and federal interference, including the administration’s blocked mail ballot rules.

“There is a lot of confusion out there, unfortunately, because of this proposed rule,” Edevbie said. “We’re going to have to do some work to reassure people that, yes, you can vote by mail. That has never changed, and it’s not going to change for this cycle.”

Questions about the reliability of the Postal Service

Election officials say that the legal fight over the Postal Service and mail ballots does not change a more fundamental problem for absentee voting: delays in mail delivery.

Michigan and other states are steering voters toward using ballot drop boxes instead of returning ballots through the mail. Washington state, where nearly all voting is by mail, is doing the same.

“There are definitely doubts, and there’s a degree of distrust” in the Postal Service, Hobbs said. “What we’re doing is reassuring voters that their votes will be counted. They do have to move more from putting their mail into a mailbox to a drop box because that is more certain.”

Sweeney Bell said that the Postal Service’s delivery issues are not new — but are important for voters to be aware of to ensure their ballots are counted.

“When I go and speak to groups, I let them know that voting by mail is not the procrastinator’s way to cast a ballot,” she said. “We’re continuing to reassure our voters that their vote will count, even if it’s by mail. But don’t delay.”

Kathy Boockvar, a former Pennsylvania secretary of state who runs an election security firm, said election officials should make sure their voters know about mail delivery issues — as well as alternatives like drop boxes and early voting.

“It’s important for election officials to affirm that there are mail delays. That is just a factual situation that we’re dealing with. We dealt with it in Covid. We’ve dealt with it in other times,” Boockvar said. “What election officials I think have been doing this year and will continue to do is have as many in-person options available to voters as possible.”

The American Postal Workers Union is mounting its own multimillion dollar ad campaign defending vote-by-mail against efforts to undermine it. This week, ads will start airing in North Carolina, where mail ballots are already going out.

“This decision is a victory for every American and a relief for postal workers who are committed to serving them,” said APWU President Jonathan Smith.

The Postal Service did not respond to CNN’s questions about the Supreme Court decision or its mail ballot rules.

Trump’s uphill path to trying again on mail ballots in 2028

The exact vote count of the Supreme Court’s order is not clear; it is only certain that at least five justices voted against Trump’s mail voting limits taking effect now, and two conservatives publicly sided with the administration.

Still, the brief, unsigned order from the court’s majority sent a notable signal. It said that the administration had failed to overcome the high burden for unfreezing the requirements now. But the court also said the administration “is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge,” meaning that the majority was likely to strike down the plan if it was pushed for a future election as well.

Besides the dissent from Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurrence hinting he thought the USPS requirements could be legal down the road even though he voted not to revive them now.

At a White House press briefing Tuesday, Attorney General Todd Blanche left open the possibility the administration could continue pursuing changes to mail voting ahead of the 2028 presidential election.

“President Trump’s efforts to make sure that we have free and fair elections are not going to stop just in November or after or thereafter,” Blanche said. “So I expect you’re going to see that work continue.”

In the meantime, Trump has attacked the Supreme Court — and the three justices he appointed in his first term.

“Republicans just got another bad decision from the United States Supreme Court, one that the Court System took forever to give, and then blamed it, in part, on no time left to implement a solution to our totally CORRUPT and out of control Mail-In voting ‘disaster,’ which is a laughing stock all over the World, and where we are the only country that has to endure such a Nation Destroying SCAM,” Trump said on Truth Social.

“These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves,” he added.

Lali Madduri, a partner at Elias Law Group, one of the firms challenging the mail-ballot initiative, said she expects another push for these mail ballot restrictions — and other interventions — ahead of the 2028 election.

“It could very well reach the [Supreme Court] again in the next couple of years,” Madduri said. “But I think [the court] already sent a pretty strong message here that it doesn’t think that the what the federal government is doing is lawful.”

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