President Trump’s efforts to restrict mail voting ahead of the midterms were thwarted by the Supreme Court, but they have sowed confusion and doubt among some voters.
Page B1From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 15 September 2026
Alito blames states for delay caused by the mail-ballot order he tried to save.
As it ran on the front
There's a lane closed on the turnpike by my house, has been since maybe July, orange barrels the whole stretch, and every morning the guy in the little booth at the plaza leans out and hollers at the cars backed up onto the shoulder like we personally poured the asphalt. "Move it up, folks, move it up." Like the delay is something we're doing to him. I sat there Tuesday, maybe twenty minutes, radio off, just watching him do this, and I thought, I know this. I've seen this exact thing somewhere else. Took me till I got home and my wife had the mail on the table to place it.
There's a page in here — hang on, I had it folded into the sports section, here — dated yesterday. The Supreme Court, this week, declined to lift an injunction on the president's mail-in ballot order. Blocked it, is the plain word for it. That's not me saying it, that's the order of business: the plaintiffs sued, the lower courts held, the order stayed blocked. Fine. Courts do that.…
…(cont) But here's the part I had to read twice, because I do that now, I read things twice. Justice Alito dissented. Him and Justice Thomas both, and Alito wrote it up sharp — "incorrect," is the word he used for the majority, which is a strong word for a man in a robe. And in the dissent — I've got it right here, I wrote it down because I didn't trust my own eyes the first time — he says the states suing "cannot claim the timing of the rule tilts the equities in their favor when they, and courts hearing their claims, are responsible for so much of the delay."
So the states are late. And the courts, hearing the states, are also late. That's his complaint. My question — and I don't know the answer, so don't write in — is what exactly was on the calendar before the states filed anything. Because a lawsuit needs something to sue about. A court needs a case before it can be slow about the case. What was sitting there first?
I called my brother-in-law, who is not a lawyer but thinks like one, cheap cigar in his mouth the whole call, and he says maybe the order came first and the delay came after, and I said that's what I thought too, and neither of us is a Supreme Court justice, so who's to say.
Meanwhile — and I don't love using that word, my wife says I lean on it — the paper of record has a separate item today. Says the states are now out there trying to rebuild trust in mail voting. Doing the work. Explaining to voters why the ballot that was supposed to work one way is going to work another way, or the same way, depending which week you check. That's not nothing. That's phone banks and mailers and a Secretary of State somewhere standing at a podium explaining a delay she didn't cause to people who are, understandably, annoyed about it.
Which brings me back to my toll plaza. Because the fella in the booth — I've watched him three mornings now, I have become a little bit obsessed, I'll admit it — never once looks at the barrels. Never once says, "sorry about the barrels, folks, that's on the crew, take your time." He looks at the cars. Every time. The cars are what's in front of him.
So — oh, hey, before you pull out, one more thing, since I've got you — the man dissenting, the one with the sharp word for the majority. He's the one who wanted the order to stand. He's the one who wanted traffic moving through that lane. And he's the one, in the same breath, pointing at the cars.
Whose barrels were those again?
“A guy sets the fire, the fire department shows up, and he stands on the sidewalk complaining the hoses are taking too long — that's the dissent, word for word. Alito wanted Trump's mail order running heading into a midterm, got told no, and instead of blaming the order, he blamed the states and courts for how long it took to say no to it. Now every Secretary of State in the country is spending real money and real hours explaining a mess they didn't start, to voters who just want their ballot to count — and that bill never lands on the guy who sent it.”
“Look, equities are equities — if you file late and the courts take their time, that's on the process, not on the order that started the process. The Justice is just noting a timing problem, he's not saying the order was fine, he — okay, he is kind of saying the order was fine. Fine, it's a well-reasoned dissent about procedural posture. That's the line. I'm sticking with the line.”
The receipts
'The plaintiff States cannot claim the timing of the rule tilts the equities in their favor when they, and courts hearing their claims, are responsible for so much of the delay,' wrote Justice Alito in dissent.
Justice Samuel Alito called the Supreme Court's refusal to lift a universal injunction against Trump's mail-in ballot rules incorrect in a sharp dissent.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.