A federal judge ruled Monday that President Donald Trump’s administration violated her court order blocking new mail-in ballot restrictions, catching officials making contradictory claims to different courts within weeks of each other.
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U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani that the Trump-governed U.S. Postal Service defied her preliminary injunction by quietly finalizing a rule implementing Trump’s executive order on mail-in ballots just days earlier, sending it to the Federal Register on August 21, despite her explicit order barring them from “initiating or completing” any such rulemaking.
“Defendants violated the preliminary injunction in this case,” Talwani wrote.
The rule in question would prohibit the delivery of mail ballots in states that haven’t turned over extensive information about who is and isn’t voting by mail on their voter rolls to the federal government. It faces lawsuits by two dozen states and voting rights organizations.
The administration argued it hadn’t technically broken the order because the Final Rule states USPS won’t enforce it for the 2026 election unless the injunctions are lifted.
But Talwani wasn’t persuaded, especially given what the administration told the Supreme Court just weeks earlier in a separate but related case. In that July 27 filing, government lawyers complained about “every day that the agencies are unable to take steps to carry out the Executive Order as to the November 2026 election” — the Supreme Court bought that argument and granted a stay in the related case on August 24, one day before Talwani’s ruling.
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Despite finding the violation, Talwani declined to impose any real penalty, ruling that the relief plaintiffs requested wouldn’t meaningfully change anything since the rule already claims to have no effect on the 2026 election while her injunction remains active. She did note that plaintiffs, led by the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts, could now amend their complaint to challenge the newly finalized rule directly, since what was once a hypothetical threat is now a completed government action.
The ruling adds to a string of court findings this year accusing the Trump administration of skirting judicial orders on voting rights, even as the broader legal fight over the president’s authority to regulate mail-in ballots continues playing out in appeals courts nationwide.
On Monday, the Supreme Court gave Trump a partial win by reversing one of the injunctions against the executive order, but the other remains in effect for now.
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