Supreme Court rejects Trump appeal over mail-in ballots

The nation’s highest court on Monday rejected the Trump administration’s emergency appeal to enact additional rules for mail-in voting in the midterm elections. The decision left in place a lower court’s ruling, which blocked the U.S. Postal Service from following an executive order to use unique envelopes with barcodes to verify recipients. The order would also have given the Postal Service the authority to reject or return ballots that didn’t meet the requirements.

The majority of the justices said they denied the Trump administration’s appeal because the government was unlikely to succeed when the full case was argued in court. They also said that the factors in play didn’t make emergency relief for the government necessary. The lower court previously cited concerns over possible voter disenfranchisement and lack of time to implement the new rules as a basis for its decision.

Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented from the majority ruling. Alito argued that some of the plaintiffs didn’t have legal basis to sue. He also wrote that he believed the government was likely to succeed in its arguments because the Postal Service has broad authority to regulate the mail.

How did President Donald Trump respond to the decision? Trump said that the majority of the justices were pandering to the political left and were afraid to stop Democrats from cheating. The court system took a long time to make a decision on the mail-in voting rules and then claimed there was no time left to implement them, he said.

Dig deeper: Read Christina Grube’s report for more details on the proposed voting rules and the lower court’s ruling.