Tangle - The Supreme Court’s latest mail-in ballot ruling.

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

On Monday, the Supreme Court stayed a federal injunction on President Donald Trump’s executive order requiring the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to change its rules for mail-in ballots. The Court’s unsigned opinion did not address the legality of the executive order; instead, the Court found that the states challenging it lacked standing to do so. The three Democratic-appointed justices dissented. A separate injunction blocking implementation of the executive order remains in place. In compliance with President Trump’s order, on August 21, USPS published a finalized rule specifying it would not deliver mail ballots in states that do not share voter data with it.Ad-free podcasts are here!Get 20% off your first year of ad-free episodes, exclusive interviews, and deep dives with Tangle’s podcast membership!All about Flock cameras.A few months ago, you may not have heard of them at all. Now, Flock cameras are everywhere — especially in Northern Virginia, where Associate Producer Aidan Gorman lives. In our latest YouTube video, Aidan takes a trip around his neighborhood and talks with law enforcement to investigate the reach and presence of Flock cameras.Check it out here.You can read today's podcast⁠ ⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠ and today’s “Under the radar” story ⁠here⁠ and today’s “Have a nice day” story ⁠here⁠.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Take the survey: Do you plan to vote by mail in 2026? Let us know. Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast written by: Isaac Saul and audio engineered and edited by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Bailey Saul, Audrey Moorehead, and Carina Pacheco. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast. It is Wednesday, August 26th. I'm your host, Isaac Saul. And here, I think this is the first time I've actually ever had this happen. It is a Wednesday, and this is the first day of the week that I've actually been on the podcast or written a take. for the newsletter. And that's because we have a wonderful, smart, growing team of writers and thinkers. And we had two topics come up this week that some members of the Tangle staff wanted to tackle. So I got to take a little bit of a backseat as an editor, which is fun. But also, I've got some pent-up

energy now, and I'm excited to deploy it today. And the timing is good, because we have a very complicated and consequential Supreme Court ruling on mail-in ballots. Separately, we also have a new YouTube video about flock cameras that is up on our channel. You can go to Tangle News on YouTube to check it out. It is a really good video. I think it's one of the best we've released ever. Super excited about it. So when you're done listening to this podcast, you can go check out our YouTube channel for that.

And we've gotten under the radar story on the State Department revoking 200,000 visas. I'm joined today on the show by Audrey Moorhead, one of our editors on the Tangle team, and she's going to take over the pod from here, and I'll be back for my take. Thanks, Isaac. Now for today's quick hits. Number one, Republican Senator Darlene Graham won the runoff in the special primary to select a Republican candidate for South Carolina's Senate race. Graham was appointed to serve the remainder of her brother, Lindsay Graham's term,

and is running for a full six-year term. Number two, Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Moscow, Russia on Tuesday. The U.S. has not commented on the purpose of the visit, but a Kremlin spokesperson said Ratcliffe met with Russian intelligence officials. Number three, Pennsylvania health officials said two unvaccinated people who had been infected with measles have died, the first measles-related deaths in the United States this year. Number four. The Department of Homeland Security's Inspector General's office found that a federal emergency management agency crew broke the law in 2024 when it skipped 11 homes with signs supporting then-candidate Donald Trump while taking part in Hurricane Milton recovery efforts. Number five, META agreed to a $16.7 billion settlement with a coalition of state attorneys general to resolve a case concerning

harms to children and teens allegedly caused by the company's social media platforms. Meta must also make several changes to its apps functions as part of the agreement. We begin with breaking news. The Supreme Court is clearing the way for President Trump. to move forward with key portions of his executive order involving mail-in voting. On Monday, the Supreme Court stayed a federal injunction on President Donald Trump's executive order requiring the U.S. Postal Service to change its rules for mail-in ballots. The court's unsigned opinion did not address the legality of the executive order. Instead, the court found that the state's challenging it lacked standing to do so.

The three Democratic-appointed justices dissented. A separate injunction blocking implementation of the executive order remains in place. In compliance with President Trump's order, on August 21st, USPS published a finalized rule specifying it would not deliver mail ballots in states that do not share voter data with the agency. For some more context, on March 31st, President Trump issued executive order 14399, directing the Department of Homeland Security to maintain lists of eligible voters in each state. Separately, the order requires USPS to receive a list of eligible mail-in voters from each state before transmitting mail-in ballots for that state. In June, following a challenge from 23 states and Washington, D.C., District Court Judge Indira Tawwani blocked the order's implementation in those jurisdictions. The First Circuit Court voted two to one

to uphold Tawani's order in July. The Trump administration then appealed to the Supreme Court to stay the injunction. Judge Tawani issued a second ruling barring U.S.PS from taking steps to implement the executive order on August 11th. In Monday's opinion, the Supreme Court majority sided with the Trump administration, writing that the injunction was premature because the states had challenged the order before USPS implemented it. The majority wrote that the state's claims of harmed relied upon an insufficient chain of inferences. However, the majority also said that if the Postal Service's final rule harms the states, they may challenge that rule, and noted that its decision did not mean that any measure taken by the government to implement the order will necessarily be lawful.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissenting opinion joined by Justice Elena Kagan. Justice Gatanghi Brown-Jackson issued a separate dissent. Justice Sotomayor argued that the respondent states have standing based on the credible threat that the government will initiate investigations and prosecutions because they refuse to use the lists. Justice Jackson wrote that the majority's decision conflicts with the court's Purcell principle, a standard establishing that courts should not interfere with election law shortly before elections to avoid confusion. Judge Tawani's second injunction against USPS remains in effect.

On Tuesday, the judge ruled that USPS's finalized rule issued last week violated that injunction. Next up, you'll hear from the right and left about the Supreme Court's decision. Then I'll pass it back to executive editor Isaac Saul for his take. We'll be right back after this quick break. First up, what the right is saying. Many on the right support the decision, with some calling for a stronger crackdown on mail and ballots. Some say the ruling sets the GOP up for failure in the midterms. Others suggest Trump's executive actions on elections will continue to be challenged.

In PJ Media, Stephen Cruiser said the ruling preserves a modicum of sanity. Anything to combat the fraud potential of vote-by-mail is helpful, and this is a good start. I'm a tough sell on this issue because I would prefer that the pool of people who are eligible to vote via the mail be drastically reduced. None of the measures discussed or proposed in recent years go far enough, in my opinion. My baseline starts with state laws that allow all mail elections being struck down. Ensuring that mail-in ballots are sent only to those who are eligible to vote, an attempt to seize control. Vote by mail features the least amount of election transparency

and therefore offers the greatest potential for fraud, especially in states like California, where every voter gets sent to ballot whether it was requested or not. The Democrats have no coherent reason to be opposed to clean voter rolls. Their levels of hysteria when responding to common-sense measures like this only make them seem even more guilty of all the things that we accuse them of. In National Review, Dan McLaughlin suggested the decision trades short-term chaos for a long-term setback for Trump. The Supreme Court was on fairly solid ground and throwing out of court the challenges to Section 2 of Donald Trump's mail-in ballot executive order. But the challenge to Section 3B raises more serious issues. The key element of that section directs the Postal Service to refuse to deliver

ballots for federal elections mailed by people not verified by DHS as citizens. State-printed envelopes need to comply with USPS rules, and the states can't comply because the rules don't exist yet. I've been critical for some time now, as have been some of the court's conservatives, of the court ducking election law disputes by constantly declaring them either premature to bring in advance or too late or moot to bring later. There's an error of that here, because the states are concerned that by the time they can bring a case against the USPS rules, it will be too late to print envelopes that comply with them. As with its disposition of Section 2, this is a short term on paper when for Trump, but may make it even harder for him to actually do anything that binds the states in the

fall, when they can reasonably argue that a late-arriving USPS dictate cannot possibly be complied with. In reason, Damon Rutt predicted the legal fighting will continue in the lower courts. Watson v. a Republican National Committee was a clear rebuke to the Republican-led effort to eliminate a common form of voting by mail. But if you thought that far-reaching decision would be the Supreme Court's final word on mail-in ballots this year, you may want to think again. The legal fighting is about to get even fiercer in the lower courts now that the Trump administration has been freed up to begin implementing the executive order. It seems quite likely that the matter will be back before the justices sooner or later for a more definitive resolution. The Trump administration

clearly wants greater control over federal elections, but the Constitution already gave that authority to the states, subject to additional regulation by Congress, not by the executive. Will those federalism principles now prevent Trump from wielding the executive branch to guarantee the midterms for the GOP? As of this writing, the Supreme Court has yet to cast it. its final vote on that pressing constitutional question. Now what the left is saying. Many on the left worry the decision will interfere with the midterm elections. Some suspect the justices are preparing to rule in Trump's favor later on.

Others note that the ruling alone does not restrict mail-in ballots. In Vox, Ian Milheiser argued the ruling revived Trump's attempt to sabotage the 2026 election. While the court's new decision in Trump v. California is troubling, it's not necessarily a sign that the justices will permit Trump's illegal order to take full effect. The court's actual holding in California is that two lower federal courts moved too quickly when they blocked the executive order. But California does not opine on whether the order is actually legal. Still, the court's decision to reinstate this order, even temporarily, is likely to confuse state election officials who are racing to prepare for an upcoming election. It would be one thing if Trump tried to impose new envelope design requirements that will take effect in future elections.

But there's simply no time for states to design compliant envelopes, get those designs approved by USPS, order dozens of pallets worth of those envelopes, and distribute them to voters in time for the 26 midterm elections. Trump has literally issued an executive order that, if implemented, might prevent many states from holding the midterm elections in the first place. In balls and strikes, Jay Willis wrote, Trump v. California does not give Trump everything he wants. A key component of President Donald Trump's plan for preserving the Republican Party's power and influence is making it as difficult as possible for Democrats to vote.

By simultaneously mandating the creation of Trump-approved eligibility lists and targeting state officials who allegedly issue ballots to ineligible voters, the White House is sending a clear message to its political enemies. Use its list or else. Trump v. California does not guarantee that the Postal Service's rule will take effect before November. Thanks to a separate injunction in the case brought by the voting rights groups, Trump's executive order is still on ice. The basic problem, though, is that by kicking the can down the road, the court is reserving for itself the option to overrule lower court rulings

that are not as deferential to Trump as the justices would like. In Election Law Blog, Justin Levitt said, none of this will actually matter. The answer to what happens next is different for lawyers and law professors than for the public. For lawyers, it's likely to be a bit of a roller coaster for a minute. For the public, the path is likely to look much, much smoother. The USPS rule is likely to stay blocked, although by new orders responding to the final rule

rather than by orders responding to the executive order. There may be a lag of a few hours or a day or two, but I don't think there will be much of a gap. Then there's going to be a flurry of applications for stays of those orders. The next 24 to 48 hours will be a mess of people filing things and courts reacting to people filing things. But the primary part that reaches the public is whether U.S. PSPS will deliver ballots. And the upshot of all the lawyering to come over the next few days is that

multiple courts will almost certainly stop USPS from claiming the authority to pick and choose which ballots to deliver. There's an injunction in place right now. And even if that goes away for a hot second for technical legal reasons, there will be another in place before anyone has time to blink. That's it for what the right and left are saying. Now I'll pass it off to Isaac for his take. All right, that is it for the left and the right are saying, and that brings me to my take. During the first 18 months of President Trump's second term, I've often underestimated him. From 2016 to 2019, before COVID upended nearly every facet of American life, Trump's style was so over the top. His norm breaking was so constant that I and many others regularly overreacted to news stories about him or his administration.

Those three years were anything but normal, but I remember my mindset sometimes veering into hysteria. I've reflected on this before and I've tried to learn from it. As we entered his second term, I tried to temper some of my more reactionary thoughts and deliberately analyze him more slowly and carefully. The result, I think, is that I've been making the opposite mistake. I've heard big, scary things he might do and thought, he won't actually do that, only for him to actually do that. I'm determined to be a quick study here and I don't want to make the same errors for the final two-thirds of his second term, so I won't downplay the stakes or underestimate his follow-through. Donald Trump is using every tool he can to limit or eliminate mail-in voting.

For now, every American's access to mail-in ballots is exactly the same today as it was last week. That's the most important thing to come out of the recent decision. Nothing has changed. The Supreme Court basically just said, there's a rule. The rule has not gone into effect, so you can't challenge it before then. And it only said that, to one of the two parties, the state challengers, who are trying to stop Trump's executive order. To me, and to anyone else who thinks Trump's order went too far, that's the good news. I didn't find the court's rationale all that convincing, but I can live with it. The bad news is pretty much everything else.

For starters, it's important to reiterate what Trump's order and the USPS rule may actually do. Scotus blog has an instructive summary that I'm going to read from now. quote, the focus of the case was on three different provisions of the order. The first instructs the Department of Homeland Security to create lists of the adult U.S. citizens in each state and to send those lists to states at least 60 days before a federal election. The second provision commands the U.S. Attorney General to prioritize the investigation and, as appropriate, the prosecution of state and local officials who issue federal ballots to individuals is not eligible to vote in a federal election.

And the third provision requires states to give the U.S. Postal Service a list of voters to whom the states intend to send mail ballots, and it prohibits the U.S.PS from mailing ballots to voters who are not on the list of enrolled voters that the U.S.PS will create. This might sound benign, and in some ways it is. The president is well within his rights to tell the Department of Homeland Security to compile lists of citizens in each state. It's not even unreasonable for him to direct investment. into state and local officials who issue federal ballots to people who shouldn't be allowed to vote,

though prioritizing those investigations is almost certainly a tactic to pressure or threaten election officials. But the third provision, directing the U.S. Postal Service to only send out pre-approved mail-in ballots and to maintain a list of voters who are eligible to vote is alarming. Without even getting into the unconstitutionality of this action, it is simply impractical. The U.S.PS is not designed to take on some. such work, especially not before the November elections. Nearly one-third of all American voters vote by mail, including President Trump, and the majority of them are Democratic voters. USPS would need to first design an envelope for states to use when they mail ballots out to voters,

despite many states having already ordered their ballots for the upcoming election. Then it would need to build a mechanism to manage all those voters, put teams in place to manage the data, and coordinate with states, and also ensure the accuracy of the state-laborate. of eligible voters. Then they need systems set up to scan, sort, and manage those ballots, about 50 million of them, and they'd have to tell voters how to receive a ballot, how to check if they're eligible, how to challenge their eligibility, and how a post-election audit would work. All of this would have to be coordinated nationally, so rules would need to apply equally to Oregon, where nearly every voter casts a ballot by mail, and Arkansas, where just 2% do.

Also, early voting begins next month, and the USPS is currently managing a fiscal crisis. Ironically, complying with Trump's order would create the greatest election security threat we've ever had. Under our current system, manipulating votes would require changing both digital and paper ballots. Infiltrating the new system would only require corrupting the database responsible for sending one-third of all Americans their ballots. That means any foreign power, federal government worker, or random hackers, who could get inside whatever system USPS builds could then upend our elections. With apologies to all my postal worker readers,

this is the same USPS that seems incapable of reliably forwarding me my mail when I change addresses. I want to remind everyone that the president just warned us that China had stolen U.S. voter data and that our elections were under threat. He greatly exaggerated that threat and the documents he released actually showed our elections are quite secure and have been safe from foreign influence.

Yet now he wants to set up a system that is more vulnerable to hacking. Am I hearing that correctly? Looking ahead, I find it very unlikely that the Supreme Court let such a rule go into effect. USPS has also said it will not take action to implement the rules unless the Supreme Court rules in its favor. The court's decision on Monday was that the states did not yet have standing to sue, despite the rule having been finalized on Friday. Georgetown Law professor Steve Vladick called this bullocks, and I'm inclined to agree.

The court's rationale is that the states could not demonstrate harm. The states and the dissenting justices argued that they would need to begin preparing now if they wanted to have a chance of implementing the rules, which is correct. And given that, the case was ripe and ready to be ruled on. I can see reasonable people disagreeing on the court's rationale, giving that the rule had not been issued. But then, on Friday, the USPS issued its rule. It was exactly what the states feared and what Trump's executive order called for, yet the court's order on Monday, bizarrely, did not acknowledge that the final rule now existed.

It's one thing for the court to say, this executive order only directs the development of future policy, and we want to see what that policy is. But it feels decidedly different when such a ruling is released after that policy becomes public, validating the exact concerns the plaintiffs raised. Still, the court clarified that it was not making a determination on the legality of the rule, and it didn't even touch the other injunction preventing it from going into place. I find some solace in that, and in the mountain of impending litigation, that will most certainly ensure this rule never becomes law.

Plenty of legal experts are rightly concerned about the per-sell principle, the court's inconsistently invoked deference against election changes before elections, but I simply can't wrap my head around that principle superseding November chaos, or the blatant illegality of what the rules direct USPS to do, infringement on states' rights and so forth. Even if this rule doesn't go into effect, though, the effort has to be contextualized with the Trump administration's broader actions. The president's polling numbers are underwater.

33% of Americans approve of how he's doing his job, and just 13% of Americans strongly approve, including only 35% of Republicans. These are the lowest numbers I can recall him having, in either term. Rather than respond to that unpopularity by resolving the war in Iran or tackling kitchen table issues for Americans, he's turning his attention to something else, how he can use his existing power to gain advantages for his party in our elections. I normally give him the benefit of the doubt here. Our elections can certainly be improved and I'm open to some of Trump's suggestions

to improve them. I've become supportive of voter ID laws and I even think the specific suggestions to make uniform how USPS handles mail ballots would be a positive if states could enact them in an orderly and voluntary manner. Even the legal experts who think this rule is illegal also think elements of it have merit. But as I said earlier, I don't want to underestimate Trump's grander intentions. Look at the track record. Rather than when the votes of American citizens, the president launched a nationwide gerrymandering war to keep his house majority. He's been obsessively pushing the Save America Act, a massive election reform bill that would make it more difficult for thousands, if not millions of eligible voters to cast ballots. He's declined to rule out declaring a national

emergency before the 26 election, sparking speculation that he may deploy national guard troops to polling places in the name of election security. Most recently, he used a national address to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the entire system, framing his preferred legislation as the only thing that could rescue it. This is a national address. This is a national address. The same thing that not particularly subtle. All of it comes six years after the president refused to accept defeat in 2020, pushed federal and state officials to refuse to certify his loss, and then egged on rioters at the Capitol. So while I'm still holding on to my confidence that this particular gambit will fail, I'm legitimately alarmed at this administration's broader strategy, a full

court press to gain any advantage it can in the upcoming election. That demands everyone's attention and a judicial branch that is proactive about protecting our sacred system. We'll be right back after this quick break. All right, that is it for my take. I'm going to send it back to Audrey for the rest of the pod, and I'll see you guys tomorrow. Have a good one. Peace. Thanks, Isaac.

Now here's our under-the-radar story. On Monday, the Associated Press reported that the State Department is planning to revoke the visas of up to 200,000 non-citizens who are in the United States on business and tourism visas and seeking asylum. If carried out, the action would be the largest single mass revocation of visas in the U.S. history. A spokesperson said the State Department is coordinating with the Department of Homeland Security on the effort, adding that, quote, the number of revocations remains dynamic and will be done on a rolling basis, end quote. While the specifics of the plan are yet to be announced, those who have their visas revoked may not face immediate deportation

and could instead be recategorized in the immigration system. The Associated Press has the story and the link is in the show notes. Finally, I'll send you off with our Have a Nice Day story. In 2010, complications from diabetes left Lou Pagean's wife partially paralyzed, and repeated hospital stays failed to slow her decline. Lou, a 69-year-old former serviceman from Shandong province, decided he didn't want her final years to be spent going in and out of a hospital. Instead, he set out with her to chase a dream they'd held since their newlywed days,

touring the country together in an outfitted camper van. Over the past decade, they visited 31 regions, throughout China. Lou says the travel has kept his wife's coordination and speech intact and made her a hundred times more spirited than she was in a hospital bed. The couple agreed, quote, we would rather die on the road than in a hospital bed. Now home from their latest trip, they're already planning the next one. The South China Morning Post has the story and the link will be in the show notes. That's it for today's podcast. If you would like to support our work, head over to reetangle.com, where you can buy a newsletter subscription, a podcast subscription,

or a bundle membership that gets you a discount on both. We will be right back here tomorrow. In the meantime, this has been editor, Audrey Moorhead. On behalf of Isaac and everyone else, have a great day and peace. Our executive editor and founder is me. Isaac Saul and our executive producer is John Wall. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman

with senior editor Will Kovac and associate editors Audrey Moorhead and Bailey Saw. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website at retangle.com.