Judge Talwani Again Blocks Trump's Mail-Voting Rules

On Thursday evening, US District Judge Indira Talwani issued a new temporary order blocking the Trump administration's effort to impose sweeping federal requirements on mail-in ballots through the US Postal Service. The order came just days after the Supreme Court reinstated the executive order that Talwani had previously halted, setting up another fast-moving legal fight over how the 2026 midterms will be conducted.

The contested rules would require states to use specially designed ballot envelopes that must be preapproved by USPS and individually scanned. Administration lawyers say the scanning step will take less than a minute per mailpiece, but state officials have translated that into concrete numbers: California alone expects to mail roughly 23 million ballots, which the state's filing says would require 23 million minutes—more than 43 years—just for that step.

Talwani's new order rests on the major questions doctrine, a legal idea the Supreme Court's conservative majority has used to limit executive agencies. Her argument is that deciding whether to effectively shut down mail voting in much of the country is a question of vast economic and political significance that Congress must clearly authorize. The administration points to two broadly worded postal statutes, but Talwani says they are not enough.

The order is temporary, and the administration is expected to ask the Supreme Court to intervene again. The central uncertainty is whether the Court's 6-3 conservative majority will apply the doctrine to a Republican president or create an exception, as some justices did in a recent tariff case.

Why the Court's Own Major Questions Doctrine Is Central in League of Women Voters v. Trump

The legal argument is not really about whether mail voting is good policy. It is about whether a small set of vague postal statutes gives the executive branch authority to remake election administration just before an election.

The Major Questions Doctrine Has an Uneven History

The doctrine was first articulated by the Supreme Court's conservative wing in the 2014 case Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA. It holds that Congress must speak clearly before delegating decisions of vast economic and political significance to agencies. The idea lay dormant during the first Trump administration, then resurfaced to block several Biden-era Covid policies. Critics note it appears nowhere in the Constitution or federal statutes and has been used only against a Democratic administration.

The Republican Split in Learning Resources v. Trump

In the 2026 tariff case Learning Resources v. Trump, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett accepted that the doctrine could apply to a Republican president. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh did not, with Kavanaugh writing that the doctrine does not apply in foreign affairs. Talwani's order is aimed squarely at the first group: if Roberts, Gorsuch and Barrett apply the same standard to voting by mail, they would join the three Democratic-appointed justices and form a majority against the rules.

The Stakes for the Court's Legitimacy

The case presents the Court with a second chance to apply the major questions doctrine in a nonpartisan way. If the doctrine is a good-faith limit on executive power, voting by mail is a straightforward application because the political stakes are enormous and the statutory basis is thin. If the Court exempts Trump again, it would reinforce the criticism that the doctrine is a partisan veto rather than a neutral rule. That tension, more than the postal details, is what makes the eventual Supreme Court decision significant.

What the Legal Fight Means for States, Voters and the Court

For state election officials, the immediate work is quantifying the burden under the proposed USPS rules before the Supreme Court acts. California's filing already does this by converting its 23 million mailings into a time cost; other states can produce the same calculation using their own ballot volumes.

  • State administrators: document the envelope design, preapproval and scanning requirements against current state systems, and estimate time and cost using actual mail-ballot counts, as California has done.
  • Voters in all-mail states: confirm your voter registration and mail-ballot preferences now; the current order is temporary, and the Supreme Court has already reinstated the administration's rules once.
  • Campaigns and party committees: model turnout under both a mail-voting option and a restricted regime. Pew Research data cited in the case shows 44 percent of Democrats and 26 percent of Republicans voted by mail in 2024, so the two scenarios are not voter-neutral.
  • The pivotal votes are Roberts, Gorsuch and Barrett: if they apply the major questions doctrine to domestic election administration, the rules likely fall.