Dead Patriots Society

for the complete documents, see: https://trumptimes.blog/2026/09/01/trump-v-california/

From District Judge Indiea Talwani’s August 27 Order:

For a State to comply with the Final Rule: (1) ballot envelopes and return envelopes must comply with certain ballot envelope design requirements,…(2) State or local election officials must submit their ballot envelope and return envelope designs to the USPS for approval, id.; and (3) after obtaining approval of the ballot envelope and return envelope designs, State or local election officials must input each voter’s information into a USPS-run electronic portal, 91 Fed. Reg. at 549991 (DMM 705.24.4.2). The Final Rule provides no timeline for USPS’s approval of ballot envelopes and return ballot envelopes, but precludes election officials from uploading voter information until the USPS approves the ballot envelopes and return ballot envelopes. 91 Fed. Reg. at 54991 (DMM 705.24.4.2(f)). And where a State or local election official does not obtain envelope and return envelope design approval, or does not upload voter information, or does not include unique intelligent mail barcodes on ballot envelopes, the USPS will not mail ballots to voters.  

[T]he Constitution charges the States with election administration. U.S. CONST. art. I § 4, cl. 1. While the States’ decisions may be pre-empted by Congress,…, the court is unaware of, and no party has proffered, any delegation Congress has made that would permit the USPS to regulate election mail,…

Plaintiff States face irreparable harm where they are required to comply with a likely unconstitutional regulation for which compliance is practically impossible as to the 2026 midterm elections, now little more than two months away. Most Plaintiff States have already ordered their mail ballots, and some are required by state law to send them to eligible voters as early as next week. Plaintiff States have neither time nor funds to design new mail ballots, seek approval of the new designs, order production of mail ballots, update their own election management systems, train election officials to use the USPS portal, and upload citizen data to the portal, all before the midterms….If Plaintiff States are unable to comply with the Final Rule, an outcome that seems unavoidable given the timeframe, they will violate their obligations under the Constitution and State laws to administer elections. Defendants and Intervenor-Defendants offer no reply to Plaintiff States’ assertion that compliance for the 2026 midterm elections will be impossible for many of them.

The record continues to lack any evidence regarding fraudulent absentee or mail-in voting…. In any event, the USPS’s interest in correcting an unsubstantiated problem through likely unconstitutional means is dwarfed by the overwhelming risk of pervasive disenfranchisement of citizens who need access to mail ballots in order to vote. The balance of harms and public interest warrants a TRO [Temporary Restraining Order].

From Justice Jackson’s dissent in Trump v. California, August 24:

Our Constitution expressly delegates the power to conduct federal elections to the States. See U. S. Const., Art. I, §4;…This “dispersal of responsibility for election administration has made it impossible for a single centrally controlled authority to dictate how elections will be run, and thereby be able to control the outcome.” Id., at 32.

The Order thus requires a fundamental overhaul of the States’ existing mail-in ballot systems—changing from a state-administered process to one in which the Federal Government controls who gets a ballot and whose vote counts.,,,States can only offer ballots to citizens whose names appear on the appropriate lists, forcing States to give their voter lists to the Federal Government in order to have their voters’ ballots processed by USPS. Ibid. And USPS can interdict and refuse to transmit mail-in ballots submitted by individuals who are not on the right list.

Moreover, and notably, due to the Order, a State’s election officials face possible federal investigation and prosecution if they fail to compile and use the new Citizenship Lists for administering federal elections. The Government admits this. See, e.g., Reply in Support of Application for Stay 13 (stating that “a State’s refusal to consider” a Citizenship List could “be relevant evidence of an intent to violate, or to facilitate the violation of, the federal laws prohibiting non-citizen voting…

The Government now asks us for a stay of the District Court’s injunction. This Court is obligated to hold the Government (just like any other party) to a high bar when seeking a stay under these circumstances….(Scalia, J., in chambers) (“[W]hen a district court judgment is reviewable by a court of appeals that has denied a motion for a stay, the applicant seeking an overriding stay from this Court bears an especially heavy burden”…

At a minimum, the successful stay applicant must make a “strong showing” that it is likely to succeed on the merits, that it will suffer irreparable harm while the case proceeds, and that, on balance, the equities—including the public’s interest—favor a stay. … The Government has not come anywhere close to carrying this burden here. 

Begin with irreparable harm. The President is only conceivably harmed by an injunction barring executive action if that court order is preventing him from doing something the law permits him to do. But here the Government has not even bothered to assert, much less demonstrate, that the President has the constitutional authority to issue an order that directs the manner in which the mail-in ballot aspect of federal elections is to be administered. This means that the Government has failed to establish irreparable harm.

The Constitution plainly assigns the power to conduct federal elections to the States. See Art. I, §4. The President does not have any legal authority to require that elections be conducted in accordance with his preferences, or to withhold delivery of mail-in ballots that are not formatted consistent with the President’s wishes….The Government is not injured in the slightest by an injunction stopping it from engaging in this patently unlawful conduct.

Footnote #7: These, by the way, are facts: The District Court considered evidence and made findings about the detrimental consequences of allowing the Order to stand…. Under this Court’s precedents, those findings are entitled to “clear error” deference.…We cannot simply set them aside or ignore them….(“Where an intermediate court reviews, and affirms, a trial court’s factual findings, this Court will not lightly overturn the concurrent findings of the two lower courts” … But nowhere does this Court’s order suggest or conclude that the lower courts’ harm-related factfinding was clearly erroneous. 

The Court’s ruling imposes needless harms on the Plaintiff States in the interim (before they can again obtain relief ) and does nothing to promote the public’s interest in well-ordered elections practices and the institutions the Constitution tasks with safeguarding democratic norms. Our precedents require balancing the equities precisely to avoid this kind of damaging and pointless outcome.

In the end,…what makes today’s ruling so off-base is the Court’s lack of situational awareness regarding this equitable judgment. It treats the Government’s stay application as if the whole point is merely to demonstrate that the Plaintiff States’ claims are not justiciable. Taking its eye off the ball, the majority misses the Government’s actual objective: to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections. 

Rather than swallow the Government’s gamesmanship whole, the Court should have given this empty, strategic, and bad-faith stay bid the swift rejection it deserves. Cf. Olmstead v. United States, 277 U. S. 438, 483–484 (1928) (Brandeis, J., dissenting) (“The governing principle has long been settled. It is that a court will not redress a wrong when he who invokes its aid has unclean hands. . . . Where the government is the actor, the reasons for applying it are even more persuasive”