A bipartisan coalition of elections officials, voting rights groups and nonpartisan watchdogs cheered Monday’s ruling by the Supreme Court that blocked President Trump’s effort to upend the vote-by-mail system just weeks before the midterm election.
Democratic and Republican elections officials expressed relief at the court’s decision, noting that in many states ballots had already been printed and sent in the mail. More than a dozen states are set to mail ballots by the end of the week.
Ricky Hatch, the Republican clerk in Weber County, Utah, said he had been preparing a contingency plan to abandon mail voting altogether if the Supreme Court allowed the United States Postal Service to restrict the practice. Now, he said, “we do have to walk back some of the contingencies that we’ve put together, but we’re grateful that at least one uncertainty has been eliminated.”
Washington State’s elections director, Stuart Holmes, also said that the state had developed contingency plans “but ballots were already printed, and it would have been very costly to shift.”
Democratic officials, many of whom oversee elections or govern states that rely heavily on the mail ballot system, praised the ruling rejecting Mr. Trump’s efforts. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said on social media that the Supreme Court had rejected the president’s plan to “rig the elections,” an effort he had previously characterized as criminal election interference.
Cisco Aguilar, Nevada’s secretary of state and the chairman of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, cheered the ruling in a statement, writing, “Today, Donald Trump lost another battle in his unconstitutional war to choose his own voters.”
He continued: “Democratic Secretaries of State applaud the court on upholding this fundamental principle, and we stand ready to fight any attempt to cause chaos, fear and intimidation in our elections.”
Other Democratic secretaries of state quickly applauded the ruling on social media. Jena Griswold, the Democratic secretary of state in Colorado, said in a statement that “mail ballots have been protected for Colorado voters,” an important legal victory for the state, which votes largely by mail.
“Trump’s attempt to sabotage the 2026 elections has failed,” Ms. Griswold wrote. “Courts have blocked Trump from using the Postal Service to choose which voters could receive a mail ballot. Trump will continue to fail in his efforts to take control of the 2026 midterms. We will fight every attempt to suppress the vote or unlawfully federalize elections.”
Secretaries of state from both parties, including seven from Republican-controlled states, had pleaded with the court to block the executive order for the 2026 election specifically, arguing that there was simply no time to implement the changes without creating mass chaos and confusion. Their argument was heeded by the court, and in particular by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who wrote that states “do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections.”
Norman L. Eisen, a lawyer and prominent Trump critic, wrote on social media that the ruling boded ill for similar efforts by the administration, calling the decision “a VERY important signal of how Trump’s other election sabotage efforts will be treated.”
Nick Corasaniti, Adam Sella, Anna Griffin, Eileen Sullivan and Richard Fausset contributed reporting.
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