California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, on Tuesday said he wants to charge Trump administration officials for breaking a court order about mail-in voting.This is part of a long-running conflict between his office and the White House, just two months before the midterm elections.
Newsom posted on X at 9:46 a.m.
on September 1, 2026, saying:
“Defying court orders to interfere with elections should mean prison time.
Lock them up.
Defend democracy.”
Defying court orders to engage in election interference should bring prison time.
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) September 1, 2026
Lock them up.
Defend democracy. https://t.co/92DiZ790KB
This post came after a report by the New York Times about a whistle-blower who said the U.S.
Postal Service is going against a court order and is speeding up the process to carry out a Trump executive order that gives the federal government more control over mail-in voting.The whistle-blower, who reported to Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat from Connecticut, and helped by a nonprofit called Whistleblower Aid, said the effort was “secretive and rushed,” and warned that its “risky and haphazard” plan could cause a big problem in the mail ballot system before the midterms.
The report said the Postal Service was aiming to finish a new system to track and check mail ballots by September 1.
The person who filed the complaint said “millions of American voters might not get their mail-in ballots on time, or at all.” The report also said the system’s checking process could reject whole groups of ballots, like tens of thousands at once, if even one barcode on a single ballot didn’t scan properly.It also said the quick development timeline made the system more likely to fail.
Blumenthal said the system was “designed to disenfranchise millions of Americans.” He added that one-third of all Americans vote by mail, and the U.S.P.S.
puts all their votes at risk.A Postal Service official didn’t comment when contacted by the Times.
The whistle-blower’s concerns are about a plan that continued even after a federal court blocked it.
Judge Indira Talwani in Massachusetts said the Postal Service’s plan was going over its legal limits and could cause chaos just two months before the elections.The court blocked the plan after the Postal Service published its plan before a separate Supreme Court ruling.
The Supreme Court had allowed the Trump administration to go ahead with the plan, saying it was too early to challenge it because it hadn’t started yet.
But Talwani said the court’s ruling was weakened once the Postal Service published its full plan, which she cited in her temporary block.
This dispute started with an executive order Trump signed in late March 2026, telling the Department of Homeland Security to make a list of verified voters in each state.
He also told the Postal Service to only deliver mail ballots to people on that list.Trump has for years claimed, without proof, that mail-in voting is full of fraud and called it “cheating,” “corrupt,” and “horrible,” even though he voted by mail in two elections this year.
Since signing the order, multiple states, nonprofits, and Democratic groups have challenged it.
In June, Judge Talwani ruled that some parts of the order were unconstitutional and blocked them from taking effect this year.That stay was lifted on August 24, when the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, allowed the plan to go forward.The three liberal justices disagreed.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in her dissent, said the decision would create a “Kafkaesque nightmare” that “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor also dissented, joined by Justice Elena Kagan.
Newsom responded to the August 24 decision by saying California would sue again to stop the Trump administration’s plan.
“The Supreme Court just let the Trump administration move ahead with its plan to disenfranchise voters across the country,” he said.“California will be suing again to block these Orwellian rules from being implemented.” His office also announced new state laws, including SB 259, that would punish people who interfere with mail ballots, including up to four years in prison for a supervisor who orders such interference.
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