Last week’s supreme court decision upholding the district court’s restraining order on USPS’s mail-in ballot restrictions is being hailed as a victory for electoral integrity by politicians, political commentators and voting rights advocates alike. The senator Chuck Schumer, for example, called the decision “one of the most important cases to protect voting rights before the supreme court”. But the unsigned, three-sentence opinion, with only a brief concurrence and a lengthy dissent, is no such thing.

The court based its brief opinion entirely on the timing of the roll-out of the new rules, which became effective on 21 August, just weeks away from the midterm elections and only days before several states were scheduled to begin mailing out their ballots. California’s submission to the court, joined by twenty-two states and the district of Columbia, asking the court to leave the injunction against the rule change in place, made clear that compliance with the rules in advance of the midterms would not only be difficult; it would be impossible without disenfranchising thousands of voters. And that, of course, is the point.

The court fight over the timing of the rule change does not address whether USPS has a right to burden mail-in voting to this degree in the first place. By statute, USPS is permitted to promulgate rules governing the mail, and the substantive question about the enactment of these rules after the elections will be whether they exceed that statutory permission or are otherwise unconstitutional.

This was the........

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