Inset: President Donald Trump listens during an event to announce the Freedom Haulers initiative at the White House, Thursday, July 30, 2026, in Washington (AP Photo/Alex Brandon). Background: The Supreme Court is seen on the morning after the conservative majority sided with the Trump administration in a case over President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting mail-in voting, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2026 (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite).
Four days before Jan. 6, 2021, President Donald Trump badgered Georgia’s Republican secretary of state over the phone, repeatedly asking him to “find 11,780 votes.” On Wednesday, Brad Raffensperger led a bipartisan group of current and former election officials in filing a brief at the Supreme Court, suggesting an off-ramp for the justices on the mail-in vote.
As blue state plaintiffs and the League of Women Voters urge the high court not to allow the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to implement its “unprecedented” and “unconstitutional” final rule, the DOJ is once again seeking a stay of a Massachusetts judge’s injunction and backing “modest envelope-design and addressee-information requirements for federal-election ballots sent via U.S. Mail” pursuant to Trump’s March executive order.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the circuit justice assigned to handle applications from the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, earlier in the week set Wednesday as the deadline for responses to the Trump administration’s request. On cue, the League of Women Voters reiterated that the “eleventh-hour” attempt by the federal government to “dictate how states administer mail voting” must fail on the merits and due to timing.
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“If states do not or cannot comply, USPS will refuse to deliver their ballots—even though states are required by their own laws to mail those ballots to millions of voters now and in the coming days,” the opposition filing said, as former national security leaders separately warn that military members and their families overseas could be disenfranchised.
“No federal statute gives USPS that power, and the Constitution assigns the Executive Branch no role in prescribing the manner of federal elections,” the group added. “Yet, at the President’s direction, USPS rushed to adopt these requirements just days before the start of mail voting for the November 3, 2026 elections.”
On the same day, a slew of amicus briefs hit the docket, including one from current and former state and local election officials, Raffensperger among them.
When the conservative majority stayed one of U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani’s injunctions in August, the per curiam order emphasized the halt did “not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the [Trump executive] Order will necessarily be lawful.”
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (Georgia Secretary of State’s Office).
Raffensperger’s coalition took “no position on whether the Postal Service had statutory authority to promulgate” the final rule, instead suggesting the justices punt on the rule’s “validity” until after the 2026 midterms but before the 2028 presidential election.
Implementing the rule at the state level can’t be done in such a short time frame and, in any event, “ballots are already going into the mail” in some states, with “other states” soon to follow, the amici said.
“No election office, at any level of government, has budgeted for the work the Rule requires. And none have the time or the means to fully train or test on this Rule. That simply cannot be done midstream of this election,” the brief said, stating as a matter of fact that mail-in ballots that are “never delivered” will deny the “franchise to an eligible voter who has followed state law in every respect,” whether they are Republicans or Democrats.
“And an election conducted under requirements that many offices could not satisfy invites a challenge to the margin in every close race in the country, brought by whichever side comes up short,” the amici continued. “Amici, who will be asked to canvass and certify those results, have a strong interest in avoiding that prospect and no stake in which party it would favor.”
In May, Jackson penned a solo dissent accusing the conservative justices of abandoning principle to aid Republicans’ electoral prospects in Louisiana.
“There is also the so-called Purcell principle,” Jackson said, “which we invoked only five months ago to chide a federal district court for ‘improperly insert[ing] itself into an active primary campaign.'”
Raffensperger’s brief similarly cautioned that “late changes of [the] kind” proposed by USPS are what the Purcell principle “forbids” and “counsels against.”
“The Rule itself supplies clear evidence that it is too late. Section 705.24.2 contemplates a runway of at least 90 days for election officials to notify the Postal Service of their intent to send ballots by mail,” the brief observed. “For the November 3 election, that date was August 3, 2026. But the Rule took effect on August 21.”
“The Postal Service adopted an immediate effective date so that the Rule would govern this election, but it did not exempt this election from a timeline its own text treats as the minimum. Nor does the calendar of federal elections require that choice,” the amici added, considering that there’s plenty of time before 2028 to reach the “merits of the Rule.”
The post Election official Trump once asked to ‘find 11,780 votes’ gives SCOTUS an off-ramp on USPS rule, notes ‘ballots are already going into the mail’ first appeared on Law & Crime.
