The Supreme Court on Monday denied the Trump administration’s bid to halt a Boston judge’s order that blocked the federal government from implementing mail-in ballot restrictions for the midterms.

Over dissent from Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, the court issued a brief order that said the government “is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to the District Court’s preliminary injunction. And the equitable factors applicable for obtaining emergency relief from this Court do not favor a stay.”

It is the latest action from the high court ahead of the November elections, as the justices have weighed in on an array of election-related issues, including congressional redistricting, campaign advertising and ballot measures.

The administration argued that the restrictions, contained in a new rule from the U.S. Postal Service, impose “only modest envelope-design and addressee-information requirements for federal-election ballots sent via U.S. Mail.” It insisted that the rule regulates the mail, not elections.

A coalition of Democratic-led states maintained that the rule is unlawful and that complying with it “would be impossible” for some states and would lead to millions of voters being unable to vote by mail and others being unable to vote at all. In other states, the coalition said, it would produce “chaos” and “a significant risk that millions more voters would be denied the ability to vote.”

The League of Women Voters and other groups who also challenged the rule said that it “would disrupt the administration of mail voting mid-election and disenfranchise eligible voters nationwide, including voters in all-mail states like Colorado and Utah and elderly, rural, and disabled voters who must vote by mail.”

In a brief concurring opinion explaining why he agreed to deny the application, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that he thought there’s “at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service’s statutory authority.” But the Trump appointee said that applying it for the midterms “would be arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections.”

In his lengthier dissent joined by Thomas, Alito said that some of the plaintiffs lack standing while others are pursuing the sort of claim that the justices in a prior case called a “Hail Mary pass” that “rarely succeeds.” He said the Postal Service “has broad authority to regulate the mail,” and that states’ practical concerns about being able to implement the rule close to the midterms aren’t enough to deny the government relief.

He said the government “has a strong interest in enforcing the rule,” and that implementing it would enhance the visibility of federal ballot mail “in order to better detect election fraud.”

When she issued a preliminary injunction on Sept. 4, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani found that implementing the rule right before the November elections “threatens disenfranchisement of millions of United States citizens who seek to vote by mail.”

The Obama-appointed judge said there was no evidence of mail-voting fraud presented in the litigation to support “the rushed implementation of the Final Rule.” President Donald Trump has railed against mail voting as fraudulent while voting that way himself.

Yet Solicitor General John Sauer pressed the fraud point in urging the Supreme Court to lift Talwani’s injunction.

“In particular,” Sauer said, the district judge’s order “bars the Postal Service from verifying that mailed envelopes comply with the Rule’s requirements for the upcoming elections.” He said she nullified the government’s efforts to address “a particularly pernicious species of fraud that dilutes the votes of lawful voters, prevents election results from reflecting the will of the American people, and undermines ‘public confidence in the integrity of the electoral process.’”

Sauer said that the postal rule creates “standardized design and review requirements for ballot envelopes that build on practices the Postal Service has long recommended,” and that it makes states “upload the name, address, and barcode information of intended recipients of ballot mail in an online portal — information that election officials would necessarily already possess to send ballot mail under the Rule to those recipients.”

He said the rule “ensures that States remain responsible for determining voter eligibility and eligibility to vote by mail, and it does not dictate ballot content, mailing or receipt deadlines, or ballot-counting procedures.”

Given all of that, he said the rule “plainly does not seize control of States’ administration of elections — it simply imposes reasonable preparation requirements for certain election-related mail.”

The Supreme Court previously sided with the administration at an earlier stage of the litigation, ruling that a challenge to Trump’s executive order on mail ballots was premature because it hadn’t been implemented yet. In that ruling last month, the court emphasized that it wasn’t saying that any action taken to implement the order “will necessarily be lawful,” adding: “On that score, time will tell.” The final rule and the litigation it prompted brought the issue back to the justices.

Among the several outside parties to weigh in was a bipartisan group of current and former members of Congress, which told the justices in an amicus brief that the administration’s executive order and rule “unconstitutionally and unlawfully usurp for the Executive Branch the authority over federal elections that the Framers granted exclusively to the States and to Congress.”

While the administration’s application to halt Talwani’s order was pending at the Supreme Court, a Trump-appointed judge in a parallel case in Washington, D.C., issued his own preliminary injunction against the rule. “As the Government concedes, the Postal Service could issue (and enforce) the Rule only if Congress gave it the authority to do so, but here no statute grants the Postal Service the power to issue key parts of the Rule,” U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols said in an opinion published Sunday.

Like Talwani did when she issued her injunction, Nichols said the prospect of disenfranchisement outweighed the prospect of fraud. He wrote that the government “does not point to any record evidence that there will be significant fraud in the upcoming elections in the event the Court enters preliminary injunctive relief.”

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

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