No State Votes by Mail More Than California. Keep Trump's Order Blocked.

Judge Indira Talwani's injunction stops the Postal Service from carrying out the order, and the administration says it will appeal.

North Carolina started sending its first mail ballots to voters on September 4, 2026. The same day, a federal judge extended her order barring the U.S. Postal Service from carrying out President Donald Trump's executive order limiting mail voting in the midterms, the Associated Press reported. My verdict, before the evidence: the Supreme Court should leave U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani's injunction exactly where it is.

California votes by mail more than any state, which means the bill for a rules change six weeks out gets paid here. It's paid by the Los Angeles County voter who fills out a ballot at the kitchen table and drops it in a blue box, and by the county staff who'd have to rebuild a mail system mid-election. Nearly a third of American voters use mail ballots, per the AP, and election officials say their machinery can't be reworked in time to satisfy the new postal directives.

Talwani, an appointee of President Barack Obama, put the calendar at the center of her ruling. States are bound by their own laws to mail millions of ballots on fixed dates, she wrote, and they "are unable to pivot this late in the election cycle, nearly guaranteeing significant disenfranchisement for eligible voters."

Here's where the verbs matter. Late last month the Supreme Court's conservative majority overturned Talwani's June hold — and it pointedly didn't say the president's order was legal. It found the suits premature, filed before the Postal Service issued its implementation rule. That rule then landed, the plaintiffs refiled, and the administration is now appealing the new injunction to the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals while a separate request sits with the justices. Asked is not granted, and a ruling on timing is not a ruling on power.

The pattern is on the docket, not in anybody's head. Trump's earlier order rewriting election rules, including documentary proof of citizenship to register, was halted by federal judges who held that the Constitution hands voting procedures to the states and sometimes Congress — not to a president. Trump has long pushed to narrow mail voting, votes by mail himself, and, as the AP notes, has falsely blamed mail balloting for losing in 2020.

The strongest argument on the other side is real, so let's say it at full strength. The justices already sided with the administration once this summer. Uniform federal standards for how ballots move through the mail aren't inherently crazy. And a district judge freezing a presidential order weeks before an election is the kind of thing appellate courts exist to check.

My answer is that the Court's earlier order doesn't cash as approval — it cashed as a date stamp, and the defect it named has since been cured by the plaintiffs. I came into this expecting to argue about what the postal rule contains. That turned out to be the smaller fight. Ballots are already moving, and no court can un-mail them.

One detail decides it for me. Talwani's order lets any state adopt the new Postal Service system voluntarily. Not one has said it will.

Source: pbs.org, retrieved September 5, 2026.