Supreme Court leaves new mail-in ballot envelope rule blocked

The first fact is procedural, and it must be kept firm before any political reading: the Supreme Court of the United States has not ruled on whether the postal service’s new rule on mail-in voting is lawful. It left things as they were. With an order dated September 14, 2026, in Postal Service v. California, the rule remains blocked: the practical effect is that the USPS requirements do not apply while the litigation continues (Supreme Court of the United States).

What the rule required

The contested text intervened on a physical object: the envelope with which the voter returns the ballot for federal elections. The rule imposed three simultaneous features: the electronic mail service logo, suitability for high-speed scanning, and a unique barcode for each voter.

These are three requirements of a different nature. The first is one of visual identification, the second concerns the mechanics of sorting, the third is the most delicate, because it links an individual identifier to the envelope containing the vote. These are not requirements that an electoral jurisdiction can meet in a few days: already printed envelopes, supply contracts and verification procedures adjust on their own timelines.

Why the calendar weighs as much as the merits

In electoral litigation, the date often matters more than the argument. According to reporting from Washington by EL PAÍS, the decision concerns the vote of millions of people less than two months before the midterm elections. This is the reason why, in electoral matters, what holds “for now” tends to hold for the entire round: if the rule does not take effect now, it can hardly produce effects on a vote held in November.

The reverse holds equally. A block pending litigation does not prevent the rule from being declared lawful further down the line, nor from being reintroduced in corrected form after the end of the proceedings. It is a snapshot of the state of the litigation as of September 14, not an endpoint.

Two origins, two natures

This story stands on two independent sources, of differing weight. The first is the act itself, the order published on the Court’s website: a primary source, which states exactly what was decided and nothing more. The second is journalistic reporting from Washington, which adds the electoral context and the estimate of the population involved. We have kept the two things separate in the text: the number of voters affected is an attribution to EL PAÍS, not a figure contained in the order.

What we do not know

Our dossier contains the order and the news report. We do not report here the breakdown of votes among the justices, the existence or content of any dissenting opinions, nor the timeline by which the case on the merits will proceed before the lower courts: these are elements we were unable to verify and which therefore do not appear in this article. Nor do we report the formal position of the parties in the proceeding, which the elements in our possession do not allow us to reconstruct.

Finally, we do not know whether the postal service intends to reformulate the requirements in a more limited version: nothing in the elements in our possession indicates this.

In the immediate term, the operational framework for those organizing mail-in voting does not change compared to before the order: no mandatory logo, no envelope with an individual barcode, no obligation of compatibility with high-speed scanning to be introduced before the November elections.