The Supreme Court cleared a key hurdle for President Donald Trump’s effort to restrict mail-in voting — but the battle over who controls mail ballots is far from over.

At issue is Trump’s executive order signed in March, giving the U.S. Postal Service unprecedented authority over who may receive mail-in ballots. The directive would require the Department of Homeland Security to compile federal lists of citizens who are eligible to vote and the USPS to deliver ballots only to people on those lists, usurping states’ power to administer elections and maintain their own voter rolls. 

On Monday, the nation’s high court concluded that a federal judge had blocked key provisions prematurely, finding that the coalition of Democratic states that sued the administration relied on speculation about the order’s hypothetical effects on the 2026 midterm elections. The Supreme Court lifted that judge’s injunction, allowing the parts of Trump’s order that creates the eligible citizenship lists and governs who may receive ballots from the USPS to proceed while the case is appealed.

But the Supreme Court’s decision Monday did not give Trump a green light to fully implement his plan. In a separate, related case brought by the League of Women Voters, the same lower-court judge issued an injunction blocking the USPS from limiting ballots to voters on those citizenship lists, preventing that part of the order from taking effect nationwide.

Still, the Department of Homeland Security will be able to continue with its plan to build a list for the USPS comprising voters from each state whom the department has determined are U.S. citizens and therefore eligible to cast a ballot. And, as Trump’s executive order states, the Justice Department could still investigate and potentially prosecute election officials who provide federal ballots to people the DHS deemed ineligible to vote.

The high court’s decision also did not address the legality of Trump’s directive. Instead, it provided a procedural win that could cause confusion for voters who, for now, do not need to amend their plans for the midterm election because a separate nationwide injunction remains in place.

“This ruling violates well-established precedents concerning this Court’s equitable discretion and needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections,” Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her dissent.

“States administering elections and the voting public that relies on them to do so deserve clarity, not caginess or confusion,” Jackson said.

Citing the Supreme Court ruling, the DOJ has already asked Judge Indira Talwani to reconsider her injunction against that provision, or at least allow it to take effect while the administration appeals.

How the states’ case interacts with the still-active injunction remains to be seen — and that likely will play out over the next week.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who led the coalition of two dozen states suing the Trump administration, said, “This fight is far from over.”

“We will continue to use every legal tool at our disposal to fight back against unlawful federal overreach whenever it occurs,” Bonta said in a statement.

Norm Eisen of Democracy Defenders Fund cautioned against overreacting to the SCOTUS decision on a proposed, rather than final, rule. “If the Postal Service’s final rule harms the States, they may challenge that rule,” Eisen wrote on Bluesky. 

Former top Georgia election official Republican Gabriel Sterling wrote on X that he expected states to sue again with proper standing, adding they “would likely succeed.” 

Now that the USPS passed the final rule — and started taking steps to implement the Trump administration’s executive order — multiple challengers are returning to court asking for new orders to block it.

In a statement, the plaintiffs in the League of Women Voters lawsuit warned that the final USPS rule could have serious effects on the midterm elections, which is now just 70 days away.

“The final rule threatens further chaos for voters, civic organizations, and election officials by seeking to impose last-minute changes to mail voting rules,” the plaintiffs wrote. “Enforcement of the court’s preliminary injunction is necessary to hold this administration accountable for its unlawful action and make clear that voters can confidently cast their mail ballot free from federal interference this November.”

Local election officials are preparing for mail ballots to go out as soon as the next couple of weeks. North Carolina requires its first mail ballots to be sent to military and overseas voters on Sept. 4, leaving little time to resolve legal fights that could result in states needing to reformat and revise their envelopes for mail ballots — a logistical feat that may not be possible to execute in time.

“It’s the voters who are getting hurt; not the politicians in Washington,” Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, who also chairs the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said in a statement, arguing the Trump administration’s provision “creates confusion and undermines confidence in our elections.”

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