“You just can’t do this so close to the election, even if the Postal Service is within its legal authority to make this new rule governing mail-in voting.” Such is the paraphrased viewpoint of Justice Brett Kavanaugh in concurring with the order of the Court that denied the Trump administration the ability to use the U.S. Postal Service’s new method of distributing and verifying mail-in vote ballots in the 2026 midterms.

The newly created rule to deliver ballots only to the names on lists of “eligible voters” curated by the federal government – ballots that would then be validated by what a postal service whistleblower claims is software that could toss out whole batches based on one bad barcode – was officially created and implemented in late August. That gave the 50 states less than three months to comply with the creation of rule-adherent proper envelopes, which would then need to be approved by the Post Office, and delivered to the voters in time for the voters to return it on time to be counted. Exhausting.

 Of course, this is all happening too close to the election! The Purcell Principle, established in Purcell v Gonzalez (2006), should have made this an easy decision and did. But Purcell is a principle that has lost every last one of its sharpest teeth in just this year alone, with the Court allowing Louisiana to cancel its primary and draw new districts, as well as allowing Alabama’s primary to go forward with a map invalidated by a lower court for being racially discriminatory. That was just 10 days before the primary. So, Purcell is convenient for when the Court wants to use it and non-existent when it doesn’t.

Today the country got the right decision. But there are a whole lot of tomorrows between now and Election Day. It’s worth reiterating: Get up and go to the polls. Don’t mail-in vote on principle – particularly when the principle isn’t as strong as it once was.