Twelve Republican state attorneys general have started the process of appealing a September court order that blocked a U.S. Postal Service plan, issued after an executive order by President Trump, that would have imposed new restrictions on mail-in voting for future federal elections, including 2028, NPR reported.
The appeal, begun Thursday, targets a preliminary injunction by U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump nominee sitting in Washington, D.C. Nichols blocked the Postal Service from implementing the plan in all federal elections. The Justice Department confirmed it is not appealing Nichols' ruling, NPR said; a correction to the story noted that the administration's appeal deadline was Nov. 12, not Nov. 13.
The states are Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas. NPR noted that it is unclear how long some of them will stay in the case, because Democrats won the attorney general's offices in Texas and Kansas in the midterms and are set to take over in January.
The blocked Postal Service rule, released in late August, would have required states to turn over lists of voters' names and addresses in order to have ballots delivered by the Postal Service. Nichols found that the agency likely lacks the power to impose that requirement. "As the Government concedes, the Postal Service could issue (and enforce) the Rule only if Congress gave it the authority to do so, but here no statute grants the Postal Service the power to issue key parts of the Rule," he wrote, according to NPR.
A separate order by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston had already stopped the Postal Service from working on a revised federal ballot-mail rule for this year's midterms. In September the Supreme Court refused to pause Talwani's ruling. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, concurring, said state and local officials did not have enough time to "reasonably implement the rule" for the midterms, but added that "there is at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service's statutory authority."
Election officials had warned that last-minute changes could disrupt voting for the tens of millions of people who regularly vote by mail, including some voters with disabilities and people in places without polling sites. A whistleblower report claimed the online system officials would have needed to use had not been properly tested and could have left eligible voters without ballots in time, or at all, NPR reported.
With the midterms over, the remaining fight is about 2028. Nichols' injunction is the broader of the two trial-court orders, and the Republican attorneys general are now trying to keep that fight alive even though the Justice Department has let its own deadline to appeal pass.