A federal judge in Massachusetts on Wednesday lifted her own order blocking the postal service from implementing election integrity measures for mail-in ballots.
US District Judge Indira Talwani issued the block after the League of Women Voters challenged proposed USPS rules that said states had to provide a list of voters who are eligible to receive mail-in ballots, and had to get their ballot designs pre-approved. Talwani's decision comes after the Supreme Court overturned a similar block by the same judge in a separate case brought by multiple states.
According to the judge, although the plaintiffs have "substantial arguments that might persuade the Supreme Court to reach a different result," the USSC's decision on Monday "compelled" her to agree to the government's motion to reconsider the block.
Ruling on Talwani's other case, the Supreme Court said she erred by blocking the USPS rules before they had been finalized, and before the states had sufficiently shown that they would be harmed by it. Days before the USSC issued that decision, however, the USPS issued finalized rules on Aug. 21, which led Talwani to declare that USPS had violated her order in the League of Women Voters case.
As the Epoch Times notes further, USPS officials said finalizing the rules didn’t violate Talwani’s order, because the agency promised not to implement it for the 2026 election unless the court orders were lifted.
“These arguments ignore the court’s explicit directive not to ‘initiat[e] or complet[e]’ rulemaking,” Talwani countered. “And Defendants cannot contend that they misunderstood the scope of the court’s order.”
The League of Women Voters asked Talwani to enforce her own order by declaring the new USPS policy “has no force or effect with respect to any federal election on or before November 3, 2026.”
Talwani declined to make such a declaration or to penalize the government. She noted in her ruling that USPS’s decision to finalize the new policy, despite her order, may end up helping the plaintiffs in the case.
Since the rules are finalized, she said, the plaintiffs can amend their lawsuit and file again. And this time, the government cannot argue that the new rule is only “hypothetical.”