Judge dismisses DOJ's 'cremated remains' analogy and blocks Trump USPS rule that 'will make voting by mail more difficult,' as all eyes stay on SCOTUS

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled in favor of Democrats and multiple political advocacy organizations on Sunday, preliminarily finding they have standing and are "likely to succeed" in showing the Trump administration's mail-in ballot rules are unlawful.

The weekend opinion from U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols started by emphasizing that the DOJ conceded that the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) "could issue (and enforce) the Rule only if Congress gave it the authority to do so, but here no statute grants the Postal Service the power to issue key parts of the Rule."

"Plaintiffs have therefore demonstrated that they are likely to succeed on their claim that the issuance of the Rule was ultra vires" — beyond the government's authority — "and the record otherwise weighs in favor of preliminary injunctive relief," said the judge, appointed during President Donald Trump's first term.

This amounts to a win — for now — for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the NAACP, and the League of United Latin American Citizens, who renewed their efforts to seek an injunction after the USPS issued the final rule. Blue states and the League of Women Voters are waiting for the U.S. Supreme Court to act on the Trump administration's request to stay a Massachusetts judge's rulings.

The League of Women Voters has said that the "eleventh-hour" attempt by the federal government to implement the rule and "dictate how states administer mail voting" must fail on the constitutional merits and due to timing. Nichols noted that the plaintiffs before him alleged the USPS rule "deprives them of a fair process, risks inaccurate election results, and undermines the campaign investments they made based on the preexisting State legal regimes."

The judge did not see that as speculation, agreeing that plaintiffs demonstrated "they will imminently suffer concrete harms traceable to the Rule."

"[T]he record demonstrates that the Rule will make voting by mail more difficult and, for some voters, effectively foreclose that option altogether. And the Court of Appeals has explained that an increased risk of disenfranchisement in an upcoming election can make that injury 'sufficiently imminent for standing purposes,'" Nichols said.

Nor did the DOJ persuade Nichols that the USPS rule, in imposing "modest [ballot] envelope-design and addressee-information requirements," was like "regulations for the mailing of cremated remains and replica explosives."

These "analogies," the judge observed, "do not help their case."

"In particular, Defendants argue that those rules demonstrate that the Service has the authority to impose special conditions on certain sensitive categories of mail. But those regulations concern how particular items are packaged, shipped, and tracked while moving through the postal system," Nichols explained. "Most of the Ballot Mail Rule, on the other hand, concerns the maintenance of absentee and mail-in voter information through the Federal Ballot Mail Portal and the vetting of Outbound Federal Ballot Mail for compliance with the entire regulatory regime—not steps that aid in the transmission of mail."

Like clockwork, the DOJ on Monday filed a supplemental brief at the U.S. Supreme Court.

If the justices grant a stay in the League of Women Voters and states' case, "it will compel the lower courts to issue a stay of the injunction" Nichols just issued, the DOJ said.

"The entry of the DSCC injunction is thus all the more reason this Court should grant an immediate stay of the injunction under review," the Trump administration said, claiming that Nichols' reasoning "disregards that interfering with efforts to deter and catch voter fraud, and to foster greater public confidence that such fraud is not occurring, is a serious irreparable injury [to the government] regardless of how much voter fraud would actually occur absent the Rule's prophylaxis."