Appeals Court Lets Trump's Mail-Ballot Takeover Stand for Now, as He Claims Power Over Elections the Constitution Gives to States

The Ruling

On July 28, 2026, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit declined to block President Trump’s executive order asserting federal control over mail-in and absentee voting. The panel did not bless the order on the merits. It upheld a May decision by U.S. District Judge Carl J. Nichols that a challenge to the order was, for now, “premature” — because the administration had not yet actually implemented the machinery the order describes. The lawsuit against it can continue. But the order stays on the books, and its status heading into the November midterms is, in the words of the coverage, unclear.

That ambiguity is itself a victory for the administration and a problem for everyone else. Election officials preparing to run the 2026 midterms now do so under the shadow of a federal order they may or may not have to comply with, litigated on a clock that may not resolve before ballots are printed. Uncertainty about the rules of an election, injected by the president himself, is not a side effect. It is a form of pressure.

What the Order Actually Does

Executive Order 14399, which Trump signed on March 31, 2026, is one of the most aggressive assertions of presidential power over elections in modern history. It directs the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to compile “citizenship lists” of eligible voters and hand them to the states. It orders the U.S. Postal Service to attach unique identifiers — “such as bar codes” — to ballot envelopes and to deliver mail ballots only to voters on state-approved lists. And it instructs the Justice Department to prioritize investigating and prosecuting election officials who send ballots to anyone the federal government deems ineligible.

Read plainly, it puts the machinery of federal elections — who gets a ballot, whose name is on the master list, which local officials get criminally investigated — under the direct supervision of the executive branch. It is a solution to a problem that does not exist: mail-ballot fraud is vanishingly rare and has never come close to affecting an election outcome. What the order would affect is turnout, by adding federal choke points to a system the Constitution deliberately kept out of the president’s hands.

A Power the President Does Not Have

Election-law scholars were nearly unanimous when the order was signed, and the passage of a few months has not changed the constitutional problem. Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution assigns the power to regulate the “Times, Places and Manner” of federal elections to the states and to Congress — not to the president. “The president has no power to direct the creation of any of these lists or to restrict the delivery of mail ballots,” said Danielle Lang of the Campaign Legal Center. UCLA election-law professor Rick Hasen called the order “unconstitutional and not something that could really be implemented in time,” predicting courts would strike it down if the administration tried.

A separate appeals court — the First Circuit — has already upheld a block on key provisions of the order. So the legal picture is split: one circuit has frozen parts of it, while the D.C. Circuit has now declined to freeze it on procedural grounds. That split is exactly the kind of disagreement that sends a case to the Supreme Court, and the administration has already asked the justices to weigh in in time for the midterms.

Why It Matters

Strip away the procedural language and the shape of this is familiar. A president who tried to overturn the 2020 election by fraud — the effort that produced four criminal indictments and the January 6 attack — is now, from inside the White House, attempting to seize control of the rules of the next one. He could not steal the last election, so he is rewriting the mechanics of the following ones: who is on the rolls, who receives a ballot, and which local officials face a federal prosecutor if they resist.

The courts have not yet stopped him. One appeals court froze part of the order; another just let it stand on a technicality; the Supreme Court will likely have the final word, with the midterms bearing down. For now, an unconstitutional assertion of presidential control over American elections remains in effect, and the question of whether it governs the 2026 vote is genuinely open. That it is even a close question is the story.