Trump Wins a Legal Battle Over Mail-in Voting

A federal judge has sided with President Trump in his push to curb mail-in voting, though other legal challenges are still in the works. US District Judge Carl Nichols in Washington on Thursday declined to issue a preliminary injunction blocking Trump's March 31 executive order on the matter, reports Reuters. The order directs federal agencies to build state-by-state lists of eligible US citizens and instructs the Postal Service to deliver ballots only to people on states' approved mail-in lists.

Democrats argued the order intrudes on states' constitutional authority over elections and could wrongly penalize legally registered voters if federal databases are outdated or flawed. The ruling comes as Republicans fight to keep control of Congress in November, with a separate Democratic-led lawsuit over the order pending in federal court in Boston. When signing the order, Trump asserted that mail-in ballots were plagued by fraud, though a 2025 Brookings Institution report found fraud in only about four cases per 10 million mail ballots—0.000043% of total mail ballots cast, per the AP.