By Nathaniel "Beltway" Steele
The Supreme Court on Monday blocked the Trump administration's last-minute push to overhaul how mail ballots are handled ahead of the November 3 midterms, denying an emergency appeal from the president's lawyers.
At issue was a Postal Service plan requiring a new, untested system of unique bar codes to track millions of mailed ballots — a change election officials said could not be implemented in time without risking delays or lost votes. States and voting rights groups had warned the plan could inject chaos into races that will decide control of Congress, particularly since some states had already begun mailing ballots to voters.
The order keeps in place a lower court ruling that had already blocked the Postal Service from moving forward. Attorney General Todd Blanche defended the administration's push, telling CBS News the Justice Department is separately examining election practices in multiple states.
Two of the Court's conservatives, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, said they would have let the rules take effect. Alito, writing for the pair, dismissed the challenge to the restrictions as a "Hail Mary pass" unlikely to succeed given the Postal Service's broad statutory authority over the mail.
Election officials across the country said they were relieved. The ruling does not resolve the underlying legal fight, which continues in lower courts, but it removes the immediate threat to ballot delivery this cycle.
The decision is only the latest flashpoint in what the New York Times has described as a broader, governmentwide effort by the president to assert more control over state-run elections — an effort that continues despite Monday's setback in the nation's highest court.
What happens next depends on lower courts still weighing the merits. Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.
— Compiled from reporting by the New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, NBC News, ABC News and CBS News.
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