By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice
The Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a win Monday on mail-in voting, and the headlines said so. But for a Colorado voter, nothing has changed yet. The state remains set to send November ballots under existing rules, because a second court order the justices did not touch still blocks the part of the president’s plan most directly tied to how voters receive their ballots.
That gap between the headline and the effect is the story. The Court cleared one obstacle in Trump’s path. It did not rule that his election order is legal, and it did not change how Coloradans get their ballots this fall.
What it means for Colorado now
Colorado is not a bystander in the case. It is one of the plaintiffs that brought the suit, represented by Attorney General Phil Weiser, and one of eight states, plus the District of Columbia, with statewide mostly mail elections. So the question of who controls the mail ballot reaches further here than almost anywhere else.
The piece of the president’s order most directly tied to ballot delivery is the Postal Service rule. It would have USPS reject ballot mailings that election officials send out if those mailings did not meet new federal standards. That rule is blocked for this year’s election, and it stays blocked for now. One thing the rule does not do is subject a voter’s completed return ballot to that acceptance-and-rejection check. The rejection mechanism applies to the outbound mailings officials send, not to the completed ballots voters mail back.
What the Court actually did
The case is Trump v. California. Twenty-three states and D.C. sued over Executive Order 14399, which Trump signed March 31. Colorado joined the coalition, with Pennsylvania participating through its governor rather than its attorney general.
In June, Massachusetts-based U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani struck down Sections 2 and 3 of the order as unconstitutional and blocked the federal government from carrying them out in the states that sued. Section 2 directs the Department of Homeland Security to build “State Citizenship Lists” of confirmed citizens and send them to the states. Section 3 directs the Postal Service to write new ballot-mail rules tied to state-submitted participation lists.
The government asked the Supreme Court to lift that June injunction while it appeals. On Aug. 24, the Court did, by a vote widely reported as 6-3. The order is unsigned and does not state a tally, but three justices dissented.
The win was narrower than it sounds. The Court did not say the order is legal. It said the states could not sue when they did, because the order on its own had not yet harmed them. The order “does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful,” the unsigned opinion reads. “But the Order itself does not harm the States, so the District Court lacked jurisdiction to bar the Government from trying to implement it.” The majority called the order “an internal directive from the President to his subordinates” that “neither requires nor forbids anything of anyone outside the Executive Branch.”
The fight, in other words, was over whether the states could go to court this early, not over whether the president has the power his order claims. The Court answered the first question and left the second for later.
The second order the Court did not touch
Here is the part that got lost in the first-day coverage. Two separate court orders were holding back the Postal Service, and the Supreme Court lifted only one.
The first was the June ruling in the states’ case. The second came on Aug. 11, when Judge Talwani issued a separate ruling in a case brought by the League of Women Voters and other voting groups. That order blocks the Postal Service nationwide from carrying out Section 3 for the Nov. 3 election or any earlier federal election, not just in the states that sued. It was not before the Supreme Court on Monday, and as of Aug. 25 it remains in effect. Talwani wrote that with fewer than 90 days before the election, “the millions of citizens who rely on mail voting require clarity as to how or whether they will vote in November.”
The Postal Service has said it will hold off. In its final rule, which it set to take effect Aug. 21, USPS wrote that because of the two court orders it “will not take actions to implement the rule specifically for the 2026 election unless and until the government obtains relief from those injunctions.”
That posture could shift, and fast. A dozen Republican-led states that intervened in the case have already appealed the Aug. 11 order to the First Circuit. On Aug. 24, the federal government asked Talwani to reconsider and vacate that order, or pause it during the appeal, calling Monday’s Supreme Court ruling “intervening and directly controlling authority.” It asked her to rule by 5:30 p.m. Eastern on Aug. 25, and said that without a ruling, the Solicitor General had cleared a stay request at the First Circuit.
A separate fight is running over the rule itself. The voting groups asked Talwani to enforce her order and declare the rule void for November. The government opposed that on Aug. 25, arguing the rule’s own text sets this year’s election aside and so its publication breaks no order. In an order Aug. 23, Talwani noted the government had neither appealed nor sought a pause before issuing the rule “on a Friday evening after the courts were closed,” and said she was prepared to block its publication in the Federal Register, set for Aug. 26, if the government wanted more time.
What the lower court found
The June ruling is where the substance lives. Talwani held the president has no authority to build the citizenship lists Section 2 orders. “The creation of the Confirmed Citizen Lists is ultra vires because the President lacks any authority to compile voter lists for each State,” she wrote. Ultra vires is a legal term for acting beyond one’s legal power.
She reached the same result on the Postal Service. “No law enacted by Congress delegates authority to control mail-in voting to USPS,” the order reads. The agency runs the mail. It does not, in the court’s reading, get to decide who may vote by mail.
Talwani also took up the order’s fallback language, the clause saying every directive must be carried out “consistent with applicable law.” The government argued that clause made the order impossible to strike down. The court rejected that, holding that an order cannot rescue an unlawful command by attaching a promise to follow the law.
The Supreme Court did not decide whether any of that was correct. It did not reach the merits. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it in dissent, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, the decision “does not address whether the President’s attempts to interfere with States’ administration of the November 2026 elections are lawful. Nor does it suggest that the Executive Branch has any constitutional or statutory authority to implement the President’s directives.”
The Colorado response and the road ahead
Weiser, who is running for governor, framed the ruling as a delay rather than a defeat. “The Supreme Court may have dodged the merits of the federal government’s actions today, but those claims will have their day in court,” he said. “Colorado relies on mail ballots, and I will use every legal tool I have to prevent the federal government from implementing any unlawful actions arising from the president’s unconstitutional executive order.”
Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, criticized the outcome but agreed on the same narrow ground. Her office noted that the decision “was specific to whether the lower courts’ determination was premature.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in her own dissent, accused the government of arguing both sides of the clock, calling the order’s changes too speculative to challenge while demanding emergency relief to impose them now. She called the maneuver “tailor-made to weaponize this case as a means of destabilizing the nation’s vote-by-mail systems through court-assisted procedural maneuvers.”
For Colorado voters, the ground under the November election has not shifted. As of Aug. 25, the state remains set to send ballots under existing rules, though a ruling on the government’s motion could come within hours. What the Supreme Court reset was the calendar for the legal fight, leaving the constitutional questions unresolved as the November election approaches.