President Donald Trump on Tuesday went after the Supreme Court after it rejected his push to restrict mail-in voting in this year’s midterms, saying justices who opposed him were “not the people I interviewed.”
The Trump administration had made a last-minute push to have the U.S. Postal Service play a central role in deciding who would be able to receive a mail ballot. But state election officials argued there was not enough time to make the changes for the Nov. 3 midterm elections - and said their systems were already secure and accurate.
The court ruled late Monday in an emergency order that the restrictions would likely lose in court, at least for this year’s election.
“The Court’s inability and unwillingness to do the right thing for our Country will go down, in a very negative way, in the annals of History,” Trump wrote in a lengthy social media post Tuesday. “This Supreme Court is bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years.”
Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh were all nominated by Trump in his first term but ruled against him in Monday’s decision.
“These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves,” Trump said, continuing that the court "is costing the United States Trillions of Dollars with shockingly bad rulings that are of such magnitude that it won’t be easily possible for our Country to recover or heal.”
Mail ballots are already being sent to voters
Election officials have said there was simply no way to carry out a complete overhaul in the weeks before the midterms. Indeed, Alabama, North Carolina and Wisconsin began sending mail ballots to voters over the past week while the new system was still not active.
The Trump administration plan would require states to adopt a uniform envelope style and submit lists of eligible voters to an online portal. The Postal Service could refuse to deliver ballots to states that didn’t comply.
The administration’s efforts had the potential to be especially disruptive in states that send out ballots entirely by mail. Washington's Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, a Democrat, said the decision means work “to carry out a safe, secure, and accurate election" can continue ”without having to upend our election processes to meet unrealistic ballot mail requirements.”
In Arizona, another largely vote-by-mail state, Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said “it is crucial for us to continue rejecting the notion that access and security are mutually exclusive when it comes to running strong elections.”
Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican serving as the state’s chief election officer, said on social media that the Supreme Court’s decision means “Utahns can have confidence that the 2026 election will proceed as normal."
The White House and Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but have in the past framed the restrictions as commonsense changes aimed at keeping elections secure.
State officials and voting rights groups pushed back
Democratic state officials and voting rights groups challenged the restrictions in court, arguing that the president has no constitutional authority to set election rules that would “virtually eliminate mail voting on the eve of a major election."
A whistleblower report, meanwhile, said the postal system’s requirements could lead to millions of mail ballots never being sent, because problems with the not-yet-operational portal meant a single bar code error could result in an entire batch of ballots being tossed out.
Some states don't have the infrastructure to quickly pivot back to in-person voting, according to court documents.
The League of Women Voters, a plaintiff in the case, called the proposed restrictions “an extraordinary attempt to interfere with voting” and said it would have thrown elections into chaos. “Voters should never be caught in the middle of a political power warfare,” said CEO Celina Stewart.
Lower courts agreed to block Trump’s plan, including a preliminary injunction issued by a judge nominated by the president.
But the Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that federal control of the Postal Service allows them to set rules for mail ballot handling and that compliance was possible.
The federal government won an early procedural decision at the Supreme Court, but the justices pointedly did not decide the legality of the plan.
Trump has long opposed mail voting and falsely blamed it for his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden, even though he often uses that method to cast his own ballot, including as recently as this year.
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.
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