By Nathaniel "Beltway" Steele
A federal judge on Thursday night barred the U.S. Postal Service from enforcing new restrictions on mail-in voting, issuing a temporary restraining order that keeps the agency out of the election process while litigation continues.
The ruling came after the judge reviewed the Postal Service's final plan to comply with demands from President Trump, who has long pushed to curtail mail voting despite no proven pattern of widespread fraud tied to the practice. This is not the first time a court has stepped in: the same judge had previously blocked an earlier version of the rules, and Thursday's order effectively renews that block for the rules' revised form.
The practical effect, for now, is that the Postal Service cannot impose the new mail-voting requirements in time for the November midterm elections. Litigation over the underlying rules continues, meaning the fight is not over — only paused.
Details of what specifically the rules would have required, and the full legal reasoning behind Thursday's order, were not fully spelled out in available reporting. Election officials in multiple states rely on the Postal Service to deliver and return mail ballots, and any disruption to that system in the weeks before an election can ripple through vote counts and certification timelines.
The administration has not said whether it will appeal. What's clear is that mail voting — a flashpoint since 2020 — remains contested terrain heading into the fall, with courts, not Congress, setting the rules of the road for now.
Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.
— Compiled from reporting by ABC News, The New York Times, NBC News, and CBS News.
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