A federal judge has halted, at least temporarily, attempts to implement Donald Trump’s executive order limiting mail voting. The president’s directive stalled for a second time about a week before the first mail ballots are due to be sent out for the rapidly approaching midterm elections. In the US district court, judge Indira Talwani placed a 14-day hold on the government implementing the order in a case that could be headed back to the supreme court, which on Monday overturned an earlier ruling of hers that had blocked Trump’s order from taking effect.
Plaintiff states have neither time nor funds to design new mail ballots, seek approval of the new designs, order production of mail ballots, update their own election management systems, train election officials to use the USPS portal and upload citizen data to the portal, all before the midterms. The latest ruling came in advance of a 3 September hearing after Democrats and voting rights groups refiled their lawsuits to comply with the recent supreme court decision. The high court’s conservative majority did not rule on the legality of Trump’s executive order.
Still, it said the legal challenges against it that led Talwani to initially freeze it were filed too soon. Since then, the administration has issued a formal rule intended to govern whether the US Postal Service will deliver states’ mail ballots – effectively restarting the legal fight. The president has long targeted mail voting, which he falsely blames for his 2020 election loss even though he himself uses it to cast his ballot.
A report by the Brookings Institution published in 2025 found that mail voting fraud occurred in only about four cases out of every 10 million mail ballots cast. The legal battle has major ramifications for the midterms. Nearly one-third of Americans vote by mail and election officials contend there is not enough time to revise their systems to comply with the new postal service directives.
Documents obtained by the Guardian and interviews with military leadership show the war in Iran has depleted the US Navy’s budget. A senior Democratic senator is calling for a criminal investigation into the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, following reporting by the Guardian that indicated he lied during Senate confirmation hearings last year. Trump called the media into the Oval Office to watch him sign an executive order to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America”.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
