The Liberty Daily 
(The Epoch Times)—A federal judge on Sept. 4 issued a preliminary injunction preventing the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) from implementing a regulation that tightens rules around mail-in voting.
The new ruling by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani follows the 14-day temporary restraining order she granted on Aug. 27, which halted key parts of the Postal Service’s final rule. The short-term freeze was set to expire around Sept. 10 if she had declined to extend it.
The Trump administration previously filed an appeal of the restraining order that was still pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, but the judge’s decision to upgrade the order to a preliminary injunction appears to have rendered that appeal moot, or legally irrelevant.
The injunction blocks the mandatory parts of the post office’s final rule published Aug. 26 that implements Section 3 of President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14399. That provision would assign federal agencies a larger role in who receives a mailed ballot and how those ballots are processed by the USPS.
Specifically, in her Aug. 27 order, Talwani blocked the post office from implementing the parts of the rule implementing Section 3 that required state and local election officials to submit outbound and return mail envelopes for USPS design review, place unique tracking barcode on those envelopes, and upload voter names, addresses, and barcode data to a new federal portal. Mailings that do not match portal data or that fall short of the envelope standards would not be accepted for delivery.
Separately, on Sept. 3, before the injunction was issued, the Trump administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court to allow the government to begin implementing the regulation that tightens rules around mail-in voting.
