Somewhere in your county, someone’s job is to ensure your elections run smoothly. She has a title like County Clerk, Registrar, or Commissioner. She has a small office, and this month she’s spent it ordering ballot stock and training the people who will sit at your precinct table in November. A rule finalized in Washington on August 21 would put a national mailing agency between her and you. A judge blocked it a week later. The Justice Department appealed the next day. Underneath the litigation is a question the Church has an actual answer to, and the answer has nothing to do with which party benefits from these changes.

The News Story

The Justice Department filed a notice of appeal on Friday, August 28, challenging a federal judge’s decision that once again bars the U.S. Postal Service from carrying out President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting mail-in voting. The filing came a day after U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, sitting in Boston, issued a 14-day temporary restraining order against key provisions of the Postal Service’s new rule, and one week before the first states are scheduled to begin mailing general-election ballots on September 4.

Talwani’s Thursday order targets the Postal Service’s “Ballot Mail for Federal Elections” rule, finalized August 21 and published in the Federal Register for public inspection. The rule implements Section 3 of Executive Order 14399, which Trump signed in March. Its most contested provision would have the Postal Service deliver mail-in ballots only to voters appearing on absentee-voter lists that states would be required to hand over to the agency, and would impose a uniform ballot-envelope standard. Under the order, the Postal Service could decline to deliver ballots from states that did not comply.

In granting the restraining order in part, Talwani wrote that the regulation is most likely unlawful because the president cannot insert the federal government into election administration without approval from Congress. She also found that states lack the time and money to design and produce new ballots, update their systems, and train officials to upload voter data to the Postal Service fewer than 70 days before the November 3 midterm elections. The judge has scheduled a September 3 hearing to decide whether to impose a longer-lasting block.

The ruling reverses direction in a case that has moved repeatedly. On August 24, the Supreme Court paused an earlier Talwani ruling that had applied to roughly two dozen mainly Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia, holding, on procedural grounds, that she had acted before the Postal Service issued a finalized plan. The high court has not ruled on whether the executive order itself is lawful. Citing that reasoning, Talwani then vacated her own August 11 nationwide order before issuing the narrower restraining order this week. Democrats, voting-rights organizations and state attorneys general filed a fresh round of suits after the finalized rule appeared.

The White House has described the plan as a set of “commonsense measures” intended to protect ballot security and has called the order blocking it unreasoned and unlawful. Celina Stewart, chief executive of the League of Women Voters, which is among the plaintiffs, said the challengers are confident the law is on their side and that voters’ rights have not changed. Challengers argue that Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution assigns the power to set federal election rules to the states and to Congress.

The case now goes to the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals and could return to the Supreme Court. Nearly one-third of American voters cast ballots by mail. Trump, who has voted by mail in Florida, has repeatedly blamed mail voting for his 2020 defeat. A 2025 Brookings Institution report found mail-ballot fraud in roughly four cases per 10 million ballots cast.^[1]

Catholic Social Teaching Analysis

When considering this situation, it is important to start with the principle rather than the politics. The politics here will flip within a decade, but the principle will not.

Pius XI stated it in 1931 and the Compendium quotes him at length: “Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do.”^[2] That’s subsidiarity. It ranks with the dignity of the person, the common good, and solidarity as one of the four permanent principles of Catholic social doctrine, which means a Catholic doesn’t get to treat it as a preference.

Notice what Pius actually says. Taking a function from the smaller body and handing it upward is an injustice and a disturbance of right order. He calls it that even when the higher body would do the job competently. The wrong is in the transfer.

The Compendium presses further. Subsidiarity “protects people from abuses by higher-level social authority,” and it “is opposed to certain forms of centralization, bureaucratization, and welfare assistance and to the unjustified and excessive presence of the State in public mechanisms.”^[3] Among the things the principle requires in practice, the Compendium lists “bringing about bureaucratic and administrative decentralization” and “appropriate methods for making citizens more responsible in actively ‘being a part’ of the political and social reality of their country.”^[4]

Now put the rule next to the current situation. American elections have been administered from the bottom up since before there was a Postal Service worth the name. Roughly 8,000 local jurisdictions maintain the rolls, print the ballots, staff the precincts and count the votes. The August 21 rule would take one link of that chain, the delivery of a ballot to a voter’s mailbox, and condition it on a national agency holding a list of who is allowed to receive one. States that declined to surrender their voter lists could have their ballot mail refused.

The question a Catholic should ask first is whether a county clerk can do the job. She can. She has been doing it, through two world wars and a pandemic, with a budget most parishes would recognize. When the lesser body is capable and functioning, moving its work upstairs is the disturbance of the right order that Pius named.

Subsidiarity has a second half that gets far less attention. The Compendium is explicit that the principle also “calls on these same authorities to help individuals and intermediate groups to fulfill their duties.”^[5] A federal government that funded ballot-tracking software for rural counties, or trained postal carriers to handle election mail on a state’s timetable, would be honoring subsidiarity exactly as the Compendium describes it. Help the clerk. The line the principle draws is between assisting the smaller body and absorbing its function, and a rule that conditions ballot delivery on states surrendering their voter lists lands on the wrong side of that line.

The Church allows exceptions, and that allowance deserves a fair hearing. “Various circumstances may make it advisable that the State step in to supply certain functions,” the Compendium says, in cases of serious imbalance or injustice “where only the intervention of the public authority can create conditions of greater equality, justice and peace.” But it adds a hard limit: “this institutional substitution must not continue any longer than is absolutely necessary, since justification for such intervention is found only in the exceptional nature of the situation.”^[6]

Test it. The stated justification is ballot security, and behind it the President’s long-standing contention that noncitizens vote illegally in numbers that change outcomes.^[7] The audits do not bear that out. Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, reviewing his own state’s rolls, identified 44 noncitizen votes cast since 2000, and said none of them affected the outcome of an election.^[8] Measured fraud in mail voting runs around four cases per 10 million ballots. Whatever else that number describes, it does not describe a local incapacity so grave that only Washington can fix it. And the remedy proposed reaches every state, including the ones with no alleged problem at all. The exception the Compendium carves out is narrow by design, and this does not fit inside it.

Here is where a Catholic reader should feel the principle bite in both directions, which is how you know it’s a principle. Imagine a future president who nationalizes ballot delivery to expand mail voting, over the objection of states that want it restricted, and imagine the policy outcome pleases you. Subsidiarity condemns that too. The wrong sits in the structure itself, and it survives every change of administration.

Then there is the calendar, which carries real moral weight. Talwani found that states cannot redesign ballots, rebuild data systems and retrain officials in the weeks remaining. Ballots go out September 4. The Compendium calls participation “the characteristic implication of subsidiarity” and “a duty to be fulfilled consciously by all, with responsibility and with a view to the common good.”^[9] The Catechism grounds that duty in the person: “It is necessary that all participate, each according to his position and role, in promoting the common good. This obligation is inherent in the dignity of the human person.”^[10] A duty you cannot discharge because the machinery changed under you 70 days out is a duty obstructed. The Compendium asks for attention to exactly this, the “cultural, juridical and social obstacles that often constitute real barriers to the shared participation of citizens in the destiny of their communities.”^[11]

And note who carries that cost first. The voter who is elderly, homebound, deployed, rural, or working two shifts is the one who needs the mail ballot to arrive without incident. Confusion is a tax the comfortable can absorb.

The Compendium also makes a further point about how a change like this gets made. Participation “is also one of the pillars of all democratic orders and one of the major guarantees of the permanence of the democratic system,” and therefore “every democracy must be participative,” which means “the different subjects of civil community at every level must be informed, listened to and involved in the exercise of the carried-out functions.”^[12] Informed, listened to, involved. The 8,000 jurisdictions that run American elections are subjects of the civil community at every level, and a rule finalized in August that reaches them in September has not listened to them in any meaningful sense. Whether the policy is wise is a separate question from whether the people who have to execute it were part of the decision. The Church says they should have been.

Some readers will answer that Congress could pass the same rule tomorrow and it would be lawful. Probably true, and it would also be better, because that route involves the states through their senators and forces the argument into daylight over months instead of weeks. The Constitution’s assignment of election rules to the states and to Congress embodies the same judgment the Church makes: decisions about how a people votes should be made close to that people, deliberately, and in public.

The Compendium’s warning about public administration lands squarely here: bureaucratization arises when “institutions become complex in their organization and pretend to manage every area at hand,” losing their effectiveness “as a result of an impersonal functionalism, an overgrown bureaucracy.”^[13] A mailing agency deciding who is eligible to be mailed a ballot is that sentence in the wild.

One more thing, and it’s the hopeful part. Two federal courts, an appeals court and possibly the Supreme Court, will resolve this in the open, on the record, with both sides represented. That is the Church’s own standard: “it is preferable that each power be balanced by other powers and by other spheres of responsibility which keep it within proper bounds. This is the principle of the ‘rule of law’, in which the law is sovereign, and not the arbitrary will of individuals.”^[14] The fight looks like chaos from the outside. It is the structure doing what it was built to do.

Which leaves you with something to actually do this week. Find out who hands you the ballot. Look up your county election office, confirm your registration status, and if you vote by mail, ask them directly what happens to your ballot if the rule changes again in September. She will tell you. That call is subsidiarity in practice rather than admiration, and it costs about four minutes.

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This story turns on subsidiarity, the principle that a task belongs to the smallest body capable of doing it.

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Footnotes

1. “Trump Admin Appeals Latest Ruling Blocking His Mail Voting Executive Order,” Associated Press, KUER 90.1, August 28, 2026, https://www.kuer.org/politics-government/2026-08-28/trump-admin-appeals-latest-ruling-blocking-his-mail-voting-executive-order; Hansi Lo Wang, “Judge Issues a New Order Blocking Postal Service’s Plan for Trump’s Mail Voting Order,” NPR, August 26, 2026, updated August 27, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/08/26/nx-s1-5945260/trump-mail-in-voting-ballots; Hansi Lo Wang, “Supreme Court Gives Trump an Interim Win on His Mail Voting Order, but Hurdles Loom,” NPR, August 24, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/08/24/nx-s1-5909592/trump-mail-voting-order-supreme-court; “Federal Judge Blocks USPS Mail-In Voting Rules before 2026 Midterms,” Fox News, August 27, 2026, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/federal-judge-blocks-trump-administration-restricting-mail-in-ballots-ahead-midterms; “Judge Blocks Trump’s Postal Service Regulation on Mail-In Ballots,” NBC News, August 27, 2026, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/judge-blocks-trumps-postal-service-regulation-mail-ballots-rcna594692; “Judge Temporarily Blocks New Postal Service Rules for Mail Voting,” CBS News, August 27, 2026, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/judge-temporarily-blocks-new-postal-service-rules-for-mail-voting-trump/; “Federal Judge Again Temporarily Blocks Trump’s Mail-In Voting Restrictions,” The Hill, August 27, 2026, https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/6056457-judge-temporarily-blocks-trump-mail-restrictions/; “Supreme Court Lifts 1 of 2 Injunctions on Trump’s Mail-Voting Executive Order for 2026 Elections,” Votebeat, August 24, 2026, https://www.votebeat.org/national/2026/08/24/supreme-court-lifts-stay-trump-executive-order-on-elections-mail-ballot-restrictions/; United States Postal Service, “Ballot Mail for Federal Elections,” final rule, Federal Register, public inspection August 21, 2026, https://www.federalregister.gov/public-inspection/2026-17238/ballot-mail-for-federal-elections; “Judge Once Again Bars Postal Service from Restricting Mail-In Vote,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 28, 2026, https://www.inquirer.com/politics/nation/judge-mail-ballots-postal-service-20260828.html. ↩
2. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), no. 186, quoting Pius XI, Encyclical Letter Quadragesimo Anno (May 15, 1931), https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/justpeace/documents/rc_pc_justpeace_doc_20060526_compendio-dott-soc_en.html. ↩
3. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 187. ↩
4. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 187. ↩
5. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 187. ↩
6. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 188. ↩
7. “Trump Signs a New Executive Order on Voting. Experts Say He Lacks the Authority,” NPR, March 31, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/03/31/nx-s1-5508948/trump-voter-list-mail-ballots-executive-order. ↩
8. “Noncitizen Voting Is Vanishingly Rare,” Brennan Center for Justice, updated September 17, 2024, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/noncitizen-voting-vanishingly-rare, citing Ohio Secretary of State John Husted in The Columbus Dispatch, March 12, 2015, https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/politics/2015/03/12/husted-finds-44-non-u/23397737007/. ↩
9. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 189. ↩
10. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 1913, https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_three/section_one/chapter_two/article_2/iii_responsibility_and_participation.html. ↩
11. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 191. ↩
12. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 190. ↩
13. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 412, quoting John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Centesimus Annus (May 1, 1991), no. 48. ↩
14. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 408, quoting John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Centesimus Annus (May 1, 1991), no. 44. ↩

Books Cited

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• Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition (Doubleday / Image, 2003)