National Affairs — The Navarro Report
The legal battle over President Trump’s mail-in voting executive order has entered its most consequential phase yet, and California sits squarely in the crosshairs. The U.S. Postal Service this week appealed a federal judge’s ruling that blocked its plan to enforce new mail-ballot requirements, setting up a near-certain return trip to the Supreme Court just weeks before Californians decide a wide-open race for governor.
The order, first issued in March, would give USPS unprecedented authority over mail voting: barring the agency from delivering ballots to voters not on state-provided citizenship lists, imposing new barcode and design standards on ballot envelopes, and reshaping how long states must retain election records. California, along with 22 other states and the District of Columbia, sued to block it, arguing the order intrudes on a power the Constitution reserves to the states — setting the “Times, Places, and Manner” of elections.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston initially sided with the states in June, ruling that no act of Congress delegates control over mail-in voting to the Postal Service. But the fight has swung back and forth since. On August 24, the Supreme Court lifted one of two injunctions blocking the order, ruling narrowly that the lower court had acted prematurely — without addressing whether the order itself is lawful. Talwani followed by vacating her own nationwide injunction and, within days, issuing a fresh 14-day temporary restraining order against the plan’s implementation. A hearing set for September 3 will determine whether that block holds through Election Day. USPS’s appeal this week all but guarantees the justices will be asked to weigh in again, this time on a compressed clock that leaves little room for error.
For California, the timing could hardly be worse. Voters head to the polls November 3 in a governor’s race that will decide who succeeds term-limited Gavin Newsom, with Democrat Xavier Becerra facing Republican Steve Hilton after a crowded primary. California also has 14 propositions on the ballot and competitive races for insurance commissioner and other statewide offices — all in a state where, per recent state data, roughly a third of ballots have been cast by mail in recent cycles. Election officials in Sacramento and in counties statewide have said they need certainty now, not in late October, to print ballots, program tracking systems, and train poll workers under whichever rules ultimately apply.
That uncertainty is the real story here, independent of how the legal merits eventually shake out. Talwani herself has flagged the risk: in an August ruling she wrote that the administration’s own filings offered no response to the states’ warning that compliance would be “impossible” for many of them on this timeline. County registrars across California, who are already mailing ballots to voters under existing state law, would face a scramble if a late-breaking court order forced last-minute changes to envelope design or delivery protocols. Arizona’s attorney general, one of California’s co-plaintiffs, put the political stakes bluntly, vowing to fight the rule “tooth and nail” in court.
There’s also a deeper structural question California readers should track. The Postal Service’s stated position is that it won’t apply the new rule to this year’s election unless both injunctions against it are fully lifted — a threshold that, as of this week, is still unmet, but only barely. That means the outcome of the September 3 hearing, and whatever the Supreme Court does after USPS’s new appeal, could determine mail-voting rules for California’s governor’s race in the final days before ballots are due, rather than months in advance, as election administrators prefer.
None of this touches the underlying constitutional question of whether a president can direct the Postal Service to police state-run elections at all — a question neither the Supreme Court nor Talwani has yet resolved. What’s clear is that California, as lead plaintiff in the original lawsuit and home to one of the most closely watched governor’s races in the country this cycle, has more riding on the next few weeks of federal litigation than almost any other state on the map.
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