The Supreme Court on Monday stayed a lower court’s decision to block a Trump administration rule designed to restrict voting by mail with just 10 weeks left before the midterm elections, while the case continues on appeal.

The ruling from the high court’s conservative majority, with dissents from the three liberal justices, comes after administration earlier in the day submitted another brief to the Supreme Court re-upping its plea for urgency as November approaches.

The Postal Service issued new regulations Friday aimed at mail-in ballots, pursuing priorities outlined by President Donald Trump in a March executive order.

States would be required to design their ballot envelopes with unique barcodes, official logos and automation-compatible formatting, according to the 95-page final rule. They would also need to provide lists of voter names and addresses to the Postal Service.

The rule has “an immediate effective date,” and delaying that “would jeopardize implementation . . . in time for the 2026 general election,” according to the document.

But the issue has been tied up in litigation, after federal courts moved to block Trump’s executive order earlier this year.

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court for a stay in July after a Massachusetts federal judge blocked the Postal Service’s initial proposal from taking effect. The updated stay application, submitted earlier Monday, takes into account the final rulemaking, which took effect Friday.

The Postal Service wrote in the final rule document that it will not implement its new regulations for the upcoming election “unless and until the government obtains relief.”

The Constitution gives states the primary authority to administer elections, but Trump has sought to exercise more control as he repeats unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud and noncitizen voting, vowing to restore “integrity” to the process.

In June, a federal judge in Massachusetts sided with states unhappy with Trump’s executive order, finding that the executive branch and mail service did not have the power to add such restrictions.

The Trump administration pushed back, and on Monday argued that the Postal Service’s “issuance of a final rule underscores the need for relief from the district court’s improper, unripe injunction.”

The rule “imposes only modest requirements for preparation and envelope design for federal ballot mail — requirements that fall well within its traditional authorities to impose mailing standards for particularly sensitive types of mail,” the brief states.

In granting the stay to allow the regulations to take effect, at least for now, the Supreme Court justices argued that the lower court erred in finding that the states, led by California, had standing to sue for relief.

The unsigned opinion said that the states are not injured by the administration’s directive to the Department of Homeland Security to create state citizenship lists, nor could the district court have had grounds to conclude that future regulations would cause harm.

The justices wrote that Article III of the Constitution “prohibits federal courts from stacking hypothetical on hypothetical to speculate that harm will eventually materialize” through the rulemaking process. The opinion also says that blocking the president’s order from taking effect would amount to unlawful interference with executive branch prerogatives.

The conservative justices don’t rule out the possibility that eventually the administration’s actions may run afoul of the court. “The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful,” they wrote. “On that score, time will tell.”

Dissents

In Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, she argues that the states have standing in the case “based on the credible threat that the Government will initiate investigations and prosecutions because they refuse to use” the citizenship lists. And she says the federal government is not harmed by being blocked from initiating prosecutions of state officials or by states declining to use the DHS citizenship lists to vet voters.

In a separate dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that given the short time remaining before the elections, preparing for implementation of the rule had already placed undue strain on state election systems. And she wrote that it was not speculation on the part of the lower court to assume potential impacts of the administration’s proposal given that there was a proposed rule published at the time of the decision.

“There is simply no factual basis for the Court’s contention that the lower courts were engaged in speculation or its suggestion that the Government might yet abandon the full court press the President’s Order has prompted,” Jackson wrote.

Voting rights groups complained that damage may already be done, even if the administration does not plan to implement the rule unless the Supreme Court acts in its favor.

Unveiling the final rule could cause “widespread confusion among election officials and the public, thereby undermining voter confidence and disrupting the administration of elections,” according to a memo filed in a lower court case over the weekend.