By John Fritze, Tierney Sneed

(CNN) — The Supreme Court on Monday said that President Donald Trump could begin carrying out parts of an executive order intended to restrict mail voting, but additional legal challenges could hinder implementation of his plan before the November midterm election.

Though the court framed the order as limited, its decision injects new uncertainty about the voting rules for the midterms by keeping alive the possibility that Trump will ultimately be permitted to impose policies outlined in the March order that gave the US Postal Service and the Department of Homeland Security unprecedented roles in the running of elections.

The high court’s 10-page order, handed down in an unsigned opinion over the dissent of the court’s three liberal justices, means that the Trump administration may move forward with a proposal for DHS to compile state-specific lists of people it believes are eligible to vote in the Democratic-led states that had challenged the plan in court.

Another part of Trump’s executive order instructs the Postal Service to impose new mandates on states that want to send ballots through the mail, requiring that they submit their own lists of eligible voters to the agency and include information on ballot envelopes to allow those ballots to be tracked. The justices gave USPS the green light to implement that aspect of Trump’s plan, but a lower court blocked that effort nationwide in a separate case.

That means more court action will likely be needed before the USPS can move forward. And that court action could result in new emergency appeals to reach the Supreme Court quickly, potentially in a matter of days. Put another way, the decision Monday will almost certainly not be the last word on Trump’s executive order on mail ballots.

“If the Postal Service’s final rule harms the states, they may challenge that rule,” the court said in its order.

The Supreme Court’s decision did not address the legality of Trump’s executive order, only the timing of the challenge to it. Trump for years has made baseless claims about widespread voter fraud while specifically attempting to undermine confidence in mail voting.

“The court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the government to implement the order will necessarily be lawful,” the court wrote. “On that score, time will tell.”

Still, the order Monday represents a loss for the Democratic states, which warned they will need to immediately begin diverting time and resources away from preparing for this year’s elections.

“The ruling is a win for Trump for the moment, but it doesn’t fully clear the way for his effort to limit mail-in ballots to go into effect,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at Georgetown University Law Center. “As soon as tomorrow, a Massachusetts district court may block the underlying USPS rule at issue — which is the real thing to watch heading into November.”

Jackson: ‘Kafkaesque nightmare’

Election cases have become particularly contentious this year at the Supreme Court, drawing sharp writing from members of both the conservative and liberal wings. In the highest profile case, the court’s 6-3 conservative majority gutted the Voting Rights Act in a significant ruling in late April dealing with Louisiana’s congressional districts.

The liberal justices dissented from the decision. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, wrote that they believed lower courts had the authority to rule in favor of the Democratic states now, while stressing that the high court’s majority had not addressed the legality of Trump’s directives on the merits.

“Today’s decision does not address whether the President’s attempts to interfere with States’ administration of the November 2026 elections are lawful. Nor does it suggest that the Executive Branch has any constitutional or statutory authority to implement the President’s directives,” Sotomayor wrote. “Instead, today’s decision merely postpones adjudication of those challenges.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, meanwhile, penned her own lengthy dissent using stronger language to bash how the ruling “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.”

She described what she saw as an inconsistent approach by the conservative majority when it comes to the timing of challenges to election policies, describing the precedents as a “Kafkaesque nightmare.”

While in the past, the court has turned away challenges to election rules for coming too late as voting approached, she wrote that “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.”

Next steps

Trump signed an executive order in March that directed the Postal Service and the Department of Homeland Security to take on new roles screening voter rolls for potential non-citizen voters and regulating states’ mail ballot programs. The Justice Department framed the effort as necessary to secure “election integrity,” but the Democratic-led states that sued said the president’s effort to exert control over elections posed “extraordinary threats to our democracy.”

Under the Constitution, it is states and Congress that determine voting procedures, not the White House or federal agencies.

The president’s order required states to submit lists of eligible voters to the US Postal Service. The agency would be barred from delivering ballots mailed by states to people not on those lists. It also required states to use tracking barcodes on ballot envelopes. And it “prioritized” federal prosecution of state election officials who send or receive ballots to non-citizens or others ineligible to vote.

The order also directed DHS to create separate lists of what it views as eligible, US citizen voters in each state. In court filings, the administration suggested that a state’s failure to use those lists to vet their voter rolls wouldn’t constitute a crime on its own but acknowledged that it could be used as “relevant evidence” in prosecutions of crimes related to non-citizen voting.

Trump has for years touted conspiracy theories about mail voting as a way to discredit the 2020 presidential election that he lost. But improper voting remains exceedingly rare, and the administration has never provided evidence of widespread fraud on a scale that could influence the outcome of the 2020 election, or any other contest.

Federal courts in Boston blocked the order’s implementation in the 23 Democratic-led states that had challenged it, but an appeals court in Washington, DC, allowed it to proceed. Trump filed an emergency appeal at the Supreme Court on July 27. The Boston court is also considering a separate challenge to the order brought by non-partisan voter advocacy groups. Judge Indira Talwani, nominated to the bench by President Barack Obama, issued a preliminary injunction in that case blocking the USPS directives nationwide.

The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to resolve the pending emergency case from the Democratic states in a way that would force lower courts to also rule in its favor in the separate lawsuit from the voter advocacy groups. But the Supreme Court in its order Monday offered little of that guidance Trump officials wanted.

In appealing the Democratic states’ case to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration danced around questions about the order’s legality, framing the dispute instead around a question of timing.

Trump’s Justice Department argued the lawsuit challenging the policy wasn’t “ripe” because the government hadn’t yet finished the process of deciding how the directives would be carried out. The Postal Service, for instance, had not yet issued its final regulations laying out how the order would be implemented. DHS, meanwhile, was still weighing whether it was even able to compile its lists, given the technical difficulties in amassing citizenship data from existing federal records systems.

But that changed on Friday, when the USPS issued its rule. That 95-page document clarified that the agency would not deliver mail ballots unless envelopes included special tracking bar codes and the voter is enrolled in a new Postal Service portal with eligibility data provided by each state. That undercut the government’s argument that it was simply too soon for the states to file their suit.

In some states, the deadline to begin transmitting mail ballots is just weeks away.

Sparring over harm

The court’s conservative majority sided with Trump in concluding that when a federal judge blocked parts of Trump’s order for the midterms, the states had not proved they were being harmed by his directives yet.

At the time, both the Postal Service and DHS had begun sketching out proposals for implementing it, but had not laid out their final plans.

The Supreme Court noted that the president’s order doesn’t require the states to do anything with the DHS lists of eligible voters.

“It does nothing to them,” the court said of the plans to create the DHS lists.

And the court noted that when the states’ case was filed, it was not clear whether USPS would issue a final regulation carrying out Trump’s orders.

The liberals disagreed, writing that even in the early stages of the litigation, states had shown they were being harmed by Trump’s instructions to his agencies. They pointed to how the administration has threatened to prosecute election officials for not adequately preventing non-citizen voting, with Sotomayor writing that the states have shown “credible threat that the government will initiate investigations and prosecutions because they refuse to use” the citizens lists assembled by DHS to vet their voter rolls.

This story has been updated with additional details.

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