A federal judge on Wednesday blocked the U.S. Postal Service from carrying out a draft rule tied to Donald Trump’s anti-mail voting order, halting the move nationwide. Judge Emmet Sullivan granted the NAACP’s request and said the proposed rule could not go forward.
The ruling matters now because USPS had already posted the draft rule on May 29, setting up a policy change that would have touched mail ballots across the United States. Sullivan’s order stops that effort in its tracks and makes clear that the Postal Service cannot use the draft rule as a path around the court-approved limits on how election mail is handled.
The decision comes out of a lawsuit the NAACP brought against USPS in 2020 after mail delays raised concerns about whether voters could get ballots and other election-related mail in time during COVID. That case produced a 2021 settlement that required USPS to safeguard mail-in voting in future federal elections and give timely delivery of election-related mail priority through 2028. Last month, the NAACP went back to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and asked Sullivan to enforce that promise.
USPS said the draft rule would implement Trump’s March executive order, which directed the Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only if states first turned over voter lists to the administration. Sullivan rejected the agency’s position, saying the proposed rule clearly violated the settlement and dismissing USPS’s arguments as without merit.
The ruling also widens the pressure on Trump’s effort after a judge in Massachusetts blocked the same order a week earlier, but only for the 23 Democratic-led states that sued. Now the nationwide halt leaves USPS with a more basic question than whether the draft rule can survive in court: how quickly it must back away from it, and whether it will try to rewrite the rule or abandon it altogether.
