What the Supreme Court’s Decision Means for the Keystone State
The Supreme Court just let part of Trump's mail voting Executive Order move forward. Here's what it means for you.
Let's start with what the Executive Order said. States have to submit a list of who is receiving a mail-in ballot at least 60 days before an election. That list has to line up with a federal citizenship list DHS is building. USPS would only send or receive ballots for voters on the state's list, nobody else.
Sounds good on the surface (we all agree only citizens should vote, right?), but there are two problems. First, that 60-day deadline hits before a lot of states' normal registration cutoffs, so someone who registers or requests a ballot later than that could get shut out. Second, the federal list has a track record of wrongly flagging actual citizens as noncitizens. So, an eligible voter could be left off the list through no fault of their own.
Here in Pennsylvania, we may of course be thinking about our neighbor, New Jersey. A software glitch there let 6,600 noncitizens register to vote, and about 400 actually cast a ballot. Is Pennsylvania in the same position? Not really. A 2026 state audit checked over 200,000 PennDOT applications and found exactly one noncitizen who even got that far, and that application was caught and corrected on the spot.
Now back to the decision. The Supreme Court allowed DHS to start building its citizenship lists, but it did not free the Post Office to use them. That's like giving them the castle but withholding the keys.
Pennsylvania is one of several states suing to stop the Executive Order, calling it “unprecedented” and “legally indefensible.” Philly's Republican City Commissioner, Seth Bluestein, added that counties statewide already bought thousands of envelopes for mail ballots, and PA already checks voter identity before counting one, so it's not clear what problem the Executive Order actually solves.
