The US Supreme Court has dealt a major legal defeat to the Trump administration by refusing to reinstate proposed US Postal Service regulations for mail-in voting.
The decision leaves intact a lower court injunction that halted the administration’s last-minute push to impose tight restrictions on mail-in ballots ahead of the upcoming midterm elections.
President Donald Trump strongly criticized the high court’s action on social media describing the ruling as a “bad decision” and a “big loss for Republicans.”
He expressed deep frustration with the majority opinion while praising conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who dissented from the ruling.
Impacts on the upcoming midterm elections
The court’s decision stops the Postal Service from implementing dynamic new rules that would have altered how mail ballots are handled, processed and tracked nationally.
Challenged by a coalition of Democratic-led states and voting rights organizations, opponents argued that enforcing brand-new federal requirements weeks before voting begins would cause mass voter confusion and disenfranchise millions of Americans.
Attorneys representing the administration maintained that the regulations fell directly within federal authority to oversee the U.S. Mail and were designed to bolster election integrity.
However, the Supreme Court’s order prevents the rules from taking effect for the midterms allowing individual states to maintain their existing long-standing mail voting procedures.
