Editorial: Trump's Supreme Court is still helping him try to steal elections

The Philadelphia Inquirer Editorial Board, The Philadelphia Inquirer on Sep 1, 2026

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The U.S. Supreme Court, as one of its members recently noted, has held that judges “are not required to exhibit a naiveté from which ordinary citizens are free.” And yet, that is precisely what its conservative justices just did.

Considering one of Donald Trump’s latest attempts to illegally suppress votes, the court’s Republican-appointed majority was — or pretended to be — so naive as to fail to notice the president’s plain intent.

At issue was Trump’s March order directing the U.S. Postal Service to restrict mailed ballots by delivering only those sent by “confirmed” citizens listed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The court allowed the government to proceed with this plot on the grounds that it wasn’t fully hatched. Because postal and other officials hadn’t yet developed a full-fledged plan to meddle with the election, the justices reasoned, it was too soon for Gov. Josh Shapiro and 22 other state officials to sue to stop them.

The ruling came, by the way, with just over two months left until the midterm elections, and some mail-in ballots expected to be sent to voters in less than a week.

It doesn’t take half a dozen elite jurists poring over this set of facts to understand what’s going on.

It isn’t genuine presidential concern about a means of voting that Americans have practiced since the Civil War and even beforehand — Pennsylvania pioneered military absentee ballots in the War of 1812 — and which Trump used as recently as this month, when he cast his ballot by mail in Florida.

Rather, the president is trying to head off a well-earned midterm shellacking of his fellow Republicans in Congress any way he can other than by actually persuading Americans to vote for them. He has already pushed unprecedented partisan gerrymandering, lobbied for legislation to make voting harder, and after his 2020 defeat, attempted to overturn results with fraud and violence. The Supreme Court helped him get away with that, too.

But it’s not impossible for a federal judge to dispense with a state-sponsored attack on democracy swiftly, decisively, and appropriately. We know that because it’s what happened when U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani ruled on Trump’s mail heist in June.

The Boston-based judge blocked the president’s executive order until after the midterms in light of the elections’ imminence and because, as she succinctly put it, “The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections.” As Talwani pointed out, the founding document delegates authority over elections to Congress and the states, neither of which ever asked a post office to take over for them.

The judge is not an outlier here: The First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld her decision in July, noting that the administration hadn’t even argued that Trump’s order was legal, only that it was too soon to consider it. The appellate court added that the states, given the approach of elections they play a substantial role in running, had “no practical choice but to respond” to the executive order when they did.

It’s not impossible for a member of the Supreme Court to recognize reality when she sees it, either. In dissenting from the majority, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that “what makes today’s ruling so off-base is the Court’s lack of situational awareness.” She added that her colleagues overlooked the administration’s “actual objective: to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections.”

As unstinting as Jackson’s dissent is, her attribution of the majority’s decision to obliviousness is charitable. The problem is less likely that the Republican appointees don’t know what Trump is up to than that they don’t care.

While the court’s ruling isn’t close to the end of the legal challenges to Trump’s scheme — another lawsuit was filed Wednesday in response to the Postal Service’s newly finished plan to lose our votes in the mail — it does perpetuate unnecessary confusion over a popular means of participating in a crucial election. Even if the president is never permitted to block ballots outright, bewildering the people who cast them will serve his purposes just fine.

In an age of official disinformation and artificial intelligence, the country could use some clarity. Fortunately, we have a Constitution that provides a crystalline degree thereof on the subject of authority over elections. Unfortunately, we have a Supreme Court that refuses to acknowledge the obvious.

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