The Supreme Court docket’s ruling on Monday permitting President Trump’s government order on mail voting to go ahead is stunningly insensitive to the context: Trump is attempting to train management over elections when he has completely no authority to take action. In a single sense, the justices determined nothing, merely saying it was too quickly for federal courts to get entangled. However in a extra necessary manner, the court docket might have and may have put an emphatic finish to the president’s efforts to attempt to regulate voting operations which might be legally the area of state governments.
The context for the Supreme Court docket’s ruling is Trump’s repeated assertion that noncitizens are illegally voting in the USA. Nonetheless, many research achieved on this matter have come to the identical conclusion: Cases of noncitizens voting are extremely rare.
One study from 2017, by the Brennan Middle for Justice, checked out 42 jurisdictions throughout which greater than 23.5 million votes had been solid, and located solely 30 situations during which there have been investigations into noncitizens voting — or 0.0001% of ballots solid.
Utah did an exhaustive evaluate of its whole voter listing from April 2025 by January 2026. After taking a look at greater than 2 million registered voters, it discovered just one occasion of a noncitizen registering to vote and nil situations of a noncitizen truly voting. In Georgia, a 2024 audit of its 8.2 million registered voters discovered solely 20 noncitizens who had registered.
In 2025, Trump issued an government order requiring that states confirm an individual’s citizenship to ensure that the person to register to vote. A federal district court docket rapidly enjoined this order, explaining that the president has no authority by any means over voter registration.
Trump then turned to Congress and urged it to cross the SAVE Act, which might require that people present proof of citizenship when registering and present photograph identification on the time of voting. It might require voters submitting absentee mail-in ballots to offer a photocopy of their ID. And the invoice would mandate that states share voter registration information with the federal authorities, which most states have refused to do. It might additionally create private prison legal responsibility for election officers who violate the regulation.
Though the Home of Representatives handed a model of the SAVE Act in February, it has died within the Senate, the place there isn’t any likelihood of getting the 60 votes wanted to finish a filibuster and cross the invoice. Undaunted, the Trump administration drafted Government Order 14399, which does three issues. It orders the secretary of Homeland Safety to create and ship citizenship lists to every state. It requires the U.S. legal professional normal “to prioritize the investigation and, as acceptable, the prosecution of state and native officers or any others” who concern ballots to ineligible voters. And it orders the U.S. Postal Service to have interaction in proposed rulemaking to limit the supply of absentee ballots.
A federal district court docket issued a preliminary injunction in opposition to this government order as an unconstitutional effort by the president to regulate the states’ election processes. The federal court docket of appeals upheld the preliminary injunction. However in Trump vs. California, the Supreme Court docket, in a 6-3 ruling on its emergency docket, reversed the decrease courts and allowed the manager order to stay in place, for now.
The court docket’s ruling was totally procedural, saying this isn’t the best manner or time to problem this government order. The justices defined that nobody was harm by the Division of Homeland Safety compiling a listing of residents who’re eligible to vote or by the president instructing the Justice Division to prosecute election officers who enable ineligible voters to solid ballots.
The court docket additionally mentioned that the U.S. Postal Service had not but issued rules so it was too quickly to problem them, and defined that it “just isn’t a proposed rule, not to mention a ultimate rule.” The court docket ended its opinion by clarifying that its ruling doesn’t imply that it’s going to discover the manager order to be lawful, simply that it can’t evaluate it now.
However the issue with this evaluation is that it ignores the context that Trump is making an attempt to do one thing he has no constitutional authority to do. The very title of the manager order, “Making certain Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections,” makes clear that Trump’s function is to attempt to pressure by government order what he couldn’t get Congress to cross. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson mentioned in her dissent, the manager order “includes the President, whom the Structure vests with no specific authority over elections, enterprise a considerable and unfunded overhaul of election practices.”
The court docket’s ruling is particularly disingenuous as a result of on Friday, the Postal Service did promulgate rules limiting the usage of the mail for delivering absentee ballots. The case is now very a lot ripe for evaluate. With the midterm elections now lower than three months away, delaying ruling on the manager order solely creates confusion as to what guidelines shall be adopted.
That is why the Supreme Court docket ought to have upheld the preliminary injunction stopping Trump’s government order. As Jackson powerfully mentioned on the conclusion of her dissent: “When the Authorities’s apparent objective is to intervene with the Plaintiff States’ practices and prerogatives in a fashion that the Structure doesn’t authorize, it’s each a critical authorized error and a grave misuse of our equitable emergency powers to let the Government proceed even one step additional.”
Erwin Chemerinsky is the dean of the UC Berkeley Legislation Faculty.
