Main: President Donald Trump speaks with reporters before boarding Air Force One at Shannon Airport, Sunday, Sept. 13, 2026, in Shannon, Ireland. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson). Left inset: U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols (U.S. District Court photo).
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., handed Democrats and several voting-rights advocacy groups an early victory Sunday, concluding they have standing to challenge the Trump administration’s mail-in ballot rule and are likely to prove it is unlawful.
In his weekend opinion, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols highlighted a key concession by the Justice Department: The U.S. Postal Service could issue and enforce the rule only if Congress had authorized it. No federal statute, however, gives USPS the power to establish several of the rule’s central provisions, the court said.
“Plaintiffs have therefore demonstrated that they are likely to succeed on their claim that the issuance of the Rule was ultra vires” — meaning beyond the government’s legal authority — “and the record otherwise weighs in favor of preliminary injunctive relief,” wrote Nichols, who was appointed during President Donald Trump’s first term.
The preliminary ruling marks a temporary win for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens. Those groups renewed their push for an injunction after USPS finalized the mail ballot rule. Meanwhile, Democratic-led states and the League of Women Voters are awaiting action from the U.S. Supreme Court on the Trump administration’s request to pause rulings issued by a Massachusetts judge.
The League of Women Voters has argued that the federal government’s “eleventh-hour” bid to impose the rule and “dictate how states administer mail voting” should fail both on constitutional grounds and because of its timing. Nichols noted that the plaintiffs argued the USPS policy denies them a fair process, creates a risk of inaccurate election results and threatens campaign investments made under existing state election laws.
Nichols rejected the suggestion that those concerns were merely hypothetical, finding that the challengers had shown they face “imminent” and concrete harm that can be traced to the rule.
“[T]he record demonstrates that the Rule will make voting by mail more difficult and, for some voters, effectively foreclose that option altogether,” Nichols wrote. He added that appeals court precedent recognizes that a heightened risk of disenfranchisement in an approaching election can be “sufficiently imminent for standing purposes.”
The Justice Department also failed to convince the judge that USPS requirements involving ballot-envelope design and addressee information were comparable to regulations governing the mailing of cremated remains or replica explosives.
Those “analogies,” Nichols wrote, “do not help their case.”
“In particular, Defendants argue that those rules demonstrate that the Service has the authority to impose special conditions on certain sensitive categories of mail. But those regulations concern how particular items are packaged, shipped, and tracked while moving through the postal system,” Nichols explained. “Most of the Ballot Mail Rule, on the other hand, concerns the maintenance of absentee and mail-in voter information through the Federal Ballot Mail Portal and the vetting of Outbound Federal Ballot Mail for compliance with the entire regulatory regime—not steps that aid in the transmission of mail.”
The post Judge dismisses DOJ’s ‘cremated remains’ analogy and blocks Trump USPS rule that ‘will make voting by mail more difficult,’ as all eyes stay on SCOTUS first appeared on Law & Crime.