President Donald Trump lashed out at the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday for blocking his efforts to give the U.S. Postal Service power to determine who can receive and cast mail-in ballots, while top Illinois Democrats and national voting rights experts hailed the ruling and said it would prevent chaos for the Nov. 3 general election.

In an unsigned order released Monday night, the court rejected Trump’s push to have the Postal Service require states to submit lists of eligible mail-in voters and use standardized, trackable ballot envelopes for delivering ballots.

Upholding a lower court order that prevented the Postal Service from enforcing the new mail-in voting rules, the high court said government lawyers were “unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge” and cited the close proximity of the November midterms.

The new Postal Service rules, the result of an executive order issued by Trump in March and the subject of several court challenges, were backed by two justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. In a dissent, Alito blamed the state challenges for pushing the issue so close to the election. Justice Neil Gorsuch said he believed the rules were legal but joined the majority to block them, citing concerns that states lack the time to implement them.

Trump on Tuesday took to his Truth Social platform to air a lengthy list of grievances about court rulings that have gone against him over mail-in ballots, tariffs, and his attempt to overturn birthright citizenship, writing the high court “will go down as having rendered some of the most destructive, hurtful, and damaging decisions in our Country’s history.”

“The damage done to America is incalculable, and they know this, just as everyone does — It is an irreparable and unrecoverable harm!” Trump wrote. “This Supreme Court is bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years.”

Trump praised Alito and Thomas as “legends” for supporting his effort to “implement a solution to our CORRUPT and out of control Mail-in voting ‘disaster.’” But the president, in apparent reference to the three Justices he appointed — Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — wrote, “These are not the same people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court; they are merely a shell of their original selves.”

If the Postal Service rules had gone into effect, they would have allowed the USPS to refuse to deliver ballots in states that didn’t provide voter lists or adhere to its ballot envelope standards. For Illinois, the stakes were high.

Matt Dietrich, a spokesman for the State Board of Elections, said the Postal Service rules left officials in county clerk and election board offices confused as to whether they could meet the ballot standards with early voting set to begin on Sept. 24. With 108 election authorities in Illinois, it would have been up to each one of those government bodies to submit, without error, a list of mail-in eligible voters to the Postal Service for ballots to be delivered and collected for return. The state elections board does not keep or compile a list of eligible mail-in voters.

Nearly 1 million of the 5.7 million votes in Illinois’ 2024 general election were cast by mail, and nearly double that number were cast in the 2020 pandemic year, state election officials have said.

Trump has regularly used mail-in voting to cast his own ballots, but he has falsely maintained that fraud involving mailed ballots cost him the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden. Trump also has falsely contended on social media that “the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes” and “must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them … to do.”

Under the U.S. Constitution, states are empowered with the duty of conducting federal elections. Illinois was one of 25 states that challenged Trump’s executive order and the Postal Service rules as an unconstitutional interference in the election process.

“The court’s decision is a victory for voters, for democracy and for the rule of law in this country,” Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul said in a statement.

“The courts have recognized that states do not have the time to completely overhaul their mail-in ballot procedures to comply with a Postal Service rule that is unlawful in the first place. If allowed to go into effect, this rule would have created chaos and undermined confidence in our upcoming general election,” he said.

Celina Stewart, the CEO of the League of Women Voters, which was part of a separate court challenge to the Postal Service rules, said, “The Postal Service exists to deliver Americans’ mail — not to rewrite election rules, demand voters’ personal information, or decide which ballots make it through the system.”

“This was an extraordinary attempt to interfere with voting in all 50 states, and voters should never have been put in this position. Voters should never be caught in the middle of a political power warfare,” she said in a statement.

At an unrelated event on Tuesday, Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker said Trump’s executive order was aimed at “taking away people’s voting rights.”

“If you are a U.S. citizen and eligible to vote, it should not be made more difficult by Donald Trump because he knows that he’s going to lose in November, and so he’s trying to keep people away from the polls,” said Pritzker, who is seeking a third term as governor while eyeing a potential 2028 presidential bid. “I’m very pleased about the Supreme Court ruling. I know he’s going to try other tricks up his sleeve, but it appears that time is or has run out for him.”

But the campaign of Pritzker’s Republican opponent, downstate farmer and former state lawmaker Darren Bailey, issued a statement saying “this should be a nonpartisan issue.”

“Citizens deserve safe, free and fair elections,” said the statement from the campaign of Bailey, who was endorsed by Trump earlier this week. “We should be in agreement in the need to ensure the integrity of our elections.”

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