A federal appeals court has refused to lift the block on key parts of President Trump's executive order tightening mail-in voting rules across 23 states, a setback that could push the fight to the Supreme Court before the midterm elections.

The Boston-based First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 on Saturday against the Department of Justice's request to pause a lower-court injunction that has kept Trump's March executive order from taking effect in those states and the District of Columbia. The coalition of plaintiff states, led by California, Massachusetts, Nevada, and Washington state, secured the original injunction on June 25 from U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, an Obama appointee who concluded that several provisions of the order were unconstitutional.

The ruling leaves the administration with a narrowing window. September and November elections are approaching fast, and the DOJ has already signaled it may seek emergency relief from the nation's highest court if lower courts continue to block the order. For voters and state officials who want cleaner election safeguards, the legal obstacle course is growing taller, not shorter.

What Trump's executive order would do, and why courts stopped it

Trump signed the executive order in March. Designated Executive Order 14399, it directed three federal agencies to take specific steps aimed at tightening who can receive and cast a mail-in ballot. The Department of Homeland Security was ordered to compile and transmit to each state a list of confirmed U.S. citizens eligible to vote, drawn from citizenship and naturalization records and other federal databases. The U.S. Postal Service was directed to deliver ballots only to voters appearing on each state's approved mail-in ballot list. And the DOJ was told to prioritize investigating and prosecuting state and local election officials who issue federal ballots to people deemed ineligible to vote.

The order set rapidly approaching deadlines for states to coordinate with federal officials and comply with the new procedures. But the 23 states and D.C. that filed suit argued the Constitution gives states, not the president, primary responsibility for administering federal elections, and that Trump exceeded his authority.

Judge Talwani agreed. In her June 25 ruling, she found that Trump lacked any authority to direct DHS to compile voter eligibility lists for each state. She also found that USPS had no statutory authorization to adopt binding regulations on mail-in voting. And she went further, writing that the order could not be used to pressure local election officials into relying on what she called "the necessarily incomplete confirmed citizenship lists as a resource, lest they face criminal prosecution."

That lower-court injunction blocked the order from taking effect in all 23 plaintiff states, and the First Circuit has now declined to disturb it.

DOJ called the lawsuit premature, the appeals court disagreed

The administration's central argument before the First Circuit was that the lawsuit was premature. DOJ lawyers contended that federal agencies had not yet finalized the actions and policies needed to implement Trump's directive, meaning the states were suing over something that had not fully taken shape.

The appeals court majority rejected that reasoning. The two-judge majority pointed to the order's own language, noting that it laid out concrete, fast-approaching deadlines that states would have to meet well before the September and November elections. The majority wrote:

"As the district court reasoned, the [executive order] lays out a clear set of rapidly approaching deadlines by which states must coordinate with federal officials and comply with new voting procedures, all while the states must also ensure that their officials and the public understand the evolving set of rules that would govern the upcoming September and November elections. The Plaintiff States have no practical choice but to respond to the [order] now."

In other words, the court found that the order was already forcing states to act, regardless of whether every implementing regulation had been finalized. USPS had already issued new proposed rules requiring states to provide names and barcodes tied to their mail-in ballots, a step the states pointed to as evidence the order was being carried out in real time.

The dissenting judge in the 2-1 split was not named in available reporting, and neither were the two majority judges. But the split itself underscores that the legal questions are genuinely contested, a fact that strengthens the DOJ's hand if it does escalate to the Supreme Court.

Competing lower-court rulings complicate the picture

Talwani's ruling was not the only lower-court decision on a challenge to the executive order. Before she acted, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., rejected a related effort by Democrats to block Trump's order on similar grounds. That ruling went the other way, finding the challenge deficient, which means two federal courts reached opposite conclusions on closely related questions.

That kind of split between lower courts is exactly the scenario that often draws Supreme Court intervention. The DOJ warned before Saturday's ruling that it might be forced to ask the justices to step in, and the Washington Examiner reported that DHS may now seek that emergency relief. Whether the Court agrees to take the case, and how quickly it acts, could determine whether any part of Trump's order shapes the 2026 midterms.

The administration has already signaled it views the Supreme Court as the proper venue to settle these disputes.

A pattern of judicial resistance, and one question of judicial credibility

Saturday's ruling is not an isolated loss. Judges have also blocked an earlier Trump executive order that required proof of citizenship to register to vote and restricted the counting of mail-in ballots. That order, too, was halted by federal courts before it could take effect.

Trump has responded to the judicial resistance by pushing Congress to pass the Save America Act, a package of voting restrictions that would put some of the executive order's goals into statute. The current status of that legislation in Congress remains unclear from available reporting, but the president has made its passage a priority.

Talwani's role in this case has drawn attention in part because she was appointed by Barack Obama. The broader question of whether Obama-appointed judges are serving as a reliable judicial roadblock to Trump's agenda is one conservatives have raised repeatedly. That concern does not make Talwani's legal reasoning wrong on its own terms, but it does shape the political context in which these rulings land.

Meanwhile, state courts across the country have been asserting their own independence from federal authority on a range of issues. A Hawaii Supreme Court justice recently declared that the state would chart its own legal path, a reminder that the tension between state and federal power runs in more than one direction.

September and November elections hang in the balance

The practical stakes are straightforward. If the injunction holds and the Supreme Court declines to intervene, or acts too slowly, the 23 plaintiff states will run their September and November elections under existing mail-in voting rules, without the new federal requirements Trump ordered. DHS will not compile citizenship-based voter eligibility lists for those states. USPS will not screen ballot deliveries against state-approved lists. And local election officials will not face the threat of federal prosecution for issuing ballots the executive order would have deemed improper.

If the Court does step in and lifts the injunction, states would face a scramble to implement new procedures on a compressed timeline, exactly the kind of last-minute election-rule change that courts and election administrators of both parties have historically tried to avoid.

The appeals court itself acknowledged the stakes, noting that the injunction prevents the federal government from enforcing the executive order "in the Plaintiff states' upcoming primary and general federal elections in September and November." The clock is running.

The New York Post reported that the 2-1 split keeps the injunction in place while the full appeal proceeds, potentially forcing the administration's hand on a Supreme Court filing.

Election integrity does not enforce itself. If the courts keep blocking every executive effort to verify who is casting a ballot, Congress will have to act, or voters will be left wondering whether the system they are asked to trust has any interest in earning that trust.