A federal appeals court on Thursday kept the Trump administration’s new mail-ballot delivery restrictions blocked, concluding that the rule was likely unlawful and could disenfranchise millions of Americans less than eight weeks before the Nov. 3 midterm elections.

The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit denied emergency requests from federal officials and Republican-led states to suspend a preliminary injunction issued last week. The court’s nine-page order leaves the central provisions of the U.S. Postal Service rule unenforceable while litigation continues. A separate administration request is already pending at the U.S. Supreme Court, so Thursday’s ruling may not be the last word before ballots are mailed nationwide.

The Postal Service rule would require states to upload lists of mail-ballot recipients and voter-specific barcodes to a federal system, obtain approval for ballot-envelope designs and use matching barcodes on outgoing and return envelopes. USPS could refuse delivery when the information did not match or a voter was missing from a state-provided list. The appeals court said the portal needed for compliance was not operational and found no basis to disturb the lower court’s conclusion that states could not complete the required changes in time.

The decision arrived after states had begun sending ballots and after the administration took the unusual step of asking the Supreme Court for relief before the First Circuit ruled. Reuters reported the ruling at 12:56 p.m. Eastern. The AP said Alabama, North Carolina and Wisconsin had already started issuing mail ballots, making the practical consequences immediate.

What the court decided

The First Circuit did not issue a final judgment on the rule. It considered whether the government and intervening states had met the demanding test for pausing an injunction during an appeal: a strong likelihood of success, irreparable harm, limited injury to other parties and consistency with the public interest. Judges Gustavo Gelpí, Julie Rikelman and Seth Aframe concluded that the moving parties had not carried that burden.

The panel agreed with U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani’s preliminary conclusion that the rule likely regulates the manner of congressional elections. The Constitution’s Elections Clause assigns that authority first to state legislatures and gives Congress power to alter state rules. It does not give the executive branch or an agency independent power to prescribe election procedures. The government described the policy as a modest regulation of mail operations, but the panel said that characterization ignored a rule directed exclusively at election mail, state election officials and ballot eligibility.

The judges also rejected reliance on the Postal Service’s general authority to manage mail. They said broad statutes governing collection, transportation and delivery were an insufficient basis for assuming Congress delegated part of its constitutional election authority to USPS. That is a preliminary assessment made in an emergency posture, not a final holding after full appellate review.

The practical findings were equally important. The record showed that states would need new envelopes, approved designs, barcode-generating technology and voter-data uploads to an unfinished portal. The Postal Service would then need to scan tens of millions of ballot envelopes and compare them with data in that system. The court said the government had not seriously disputed the lower court’s findings that those steps could not be completed before the election.

The panel further said there was no record evidence of past mail-ballot fraud or an impending fraud threat tied to the November election. On the evidence before it, the judges found that activating the rule would risk widespread disenfranchisement while producing minimal, if any, gains against fraud. That conclusion addresses the evidentiary record in this case; it does not declare that election fraud can never occur.

How the dispute reached this point

President Donald Trump directed the Postal Service to develop new ballot-mail restrictions as part of a March executive order on citizenship verification and election administration. USPS finalized its implementing rule on Aug. 26, approximately a week before some states were due to start sending ballots. An earlier AP report described the rule as barring delivery of ballots from states that did not submit required voter information and adopt the prescribed envelope controls.

Voting-rights organizations and a coalition of Democratic-led states filed new challenges after the final rule was issued. Talwani entered a preliminary injunction on Sept. 4, finding that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on constitutional and statutory claims and that implementation could cause irreparable harm. A contemporaneous court account said the order preserved ordinary ballot delivery across thousands of election jurisdictions while the case proceeded.

The litigation followed an earlier round in which the Supreme Court lifted a temporary block on procedural grounds before USPS had finalized its policy. The plaintiffs then challenged the completed rule rather than a proposed action. Thursday’s First Circuit order expressly confines its merits analysis to the Elections Clause and does not decide the additional statutory claims Talwani found likely to succeed.

The administration argues that the injunction interferes with USPS operations and creates uncertainty as election preparations advance. Its Supreme Court filing called the rule a postal measure intended to protect election integrity, according to a Reuters report. The First Circuit answered that the rule’s title, stated purpose and requirements for state election officials made its electoral character clear.

Why the timing matters

Every state permits some form of mail voting. Twenty-nine states allow any eligible voter to request a mail ballot without giving a reason, and eight primarily conduct elections by mail, according to Reuters. The rule therefore reaches beyond a narrow group of jurisdictions even though state laws and participation rates vary widely.

Election administrators build ballot layouts, order envelopes, assign tracking codes and test systems months before voting. Changing those processes after ballots begin moving through the mail creates risks that are distinct from the legal dispute over presidential authority. An AP examination detailed how postal operations, state deadlines and ballot-tracking systems must work together for election mail to arrive and be counted.

The First Circuit relied on unrebutted evidence that organizations serving voters had already delayed or revised education materials because they could not tell people what rules would apply. The League of Women Voters said the uncertainty impaired registration and mail-voting assistance. OCA–Asian Pacific American Advocates said it could require expedited translations and more in-person language support. Those operational injuries helped the panel uphold the nationwide scope of the injunction.

The case is politically charged, but Thursday’s legal question was narrower than the broader debate over mail voting. Trump and his allies say tighter controls are needed to safeguard federal elections. The challengers say the executive branch is displacing state procedures without authority from Congress. The court did not choose an election policy; it decided that the government had not justified enforcing this particular rule while its legality is reviewed.

What happens next

The administration’s emergency application is pending before the Supreme Court. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who handles emergency matters from the First Circuit, can decide the request herself or refer it to the full Court. A prior AP account noted that the justices’ earlier intervention did not resolve the constitutionality of the final USPS rule.

Unless the Supreme Court acts, the injunction remains in force and USPS must continue processing election mail without the challenged list, barcode-matching and envelope-approval conditions. The underlying appeals and district-court cases will continue, and the government can still argue that the rule is lawful after a fuller record and briefing.

The immediate confirmed change is nonetheless substantial: a federal appellate court has left nationwide protections in place against a ballot-delivery system that, by the judiciary’s current assessment, states could not implement and that could prevent millions of eligible voters from receiving or returning ballots. The next consequential decision now rests with the Supreme Court.