Indian-American judge extends block on Trump’s mail-voting curbs ahead of midterm elections

A federal judge has again blocked President Donald Trump’s attempt to overhaul mail-in voting, delivering another legal setback to the administration less than two months before the November midterm elections.

District Judge Indira Talwani issued a preliminary injunction on Friday barring the US Postal Service from implementing the new procedures. Her ruling came as North Carolina began sending mail-in ballots for the November 3 elections.

Talwani said states did not have enough time to redesign their election systems before ballots had to be mailed. States must send millions of ballots within legally prescribed deadlines, she said, and major changes at this stage could cause “significant disenfranchisement” of eligible voters.

The case was brought by a coalition of 24 state attorneys general challenging Trump’s March executive order. The order calls for a nationwide system in which the Postal Service would work with states to compile lists of eligible mail voters and send ballots only to people on those lists. The administration says tighter controls are needed to protect elections from fraud, while critics and voting-rights groups dispute Trump’s authority to impose them. No state has announced plans to adopt the system voluntarily.

The administration had already taken an earlier challenge to the Supreme Court and is expected to appeal Friday’s injunction. The justices overturned Talwani’s previous block last month without deciding whether the executive order was lawful, finding that the challenge had been filed before the Postal Service formally issued implementation rules. After those rules were issued, the states and voting-rights groups renewed their lawsuit.

The Postal Service has also questioned whether it has the technology to carry out the plan. A whistleblower warned this week that systems developed quickly for the new procedures could fail and leave millions of voters without mail-in ballots. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who co-led the state coalition, welcomed Talwani’s ruling and said it would keep the proposed changes blocked while the case continues.

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significant disenfranchisement