The Supreme Court ruled Monday that President Trump’s executive order tightening the rules around mail-in voting can be implemented ahead of the November midterm elections.
The 6-3 decision — with liberal Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor dissenting — marks a major victory for Trump, but appears to leave room for future legal challenges that could delay the president’s order.
In its ruling, the high court overturned a lower court order that blocked the Trump administration from enforcing the March 31 mail-in voting order in response to a lawsuit filed by 23 Democratic-led states, who argued the directive unconstitutionally infringes on their authority to administer elections.
The Supreme Court did not rule on whether Trump’s order was lawful, but determined it was too early for states to sue over it because harms must be “concrete” rather than “conjectural or hypothetical.”
The majority further noted that federal courts are barred from adjudicating disputes dependent on “contingent future events that may not occur as anticipated, or indeed may not occur at all.”
The injunction lifted by the high court had applied to the 23 states challenging the president’s order.
Democratic New York Attorney General Letitia James, who was part of the lawsuit, vowed that the “fight is far from over.”
“This decision is a painful setback, but it will not be the final word,” James said in a statement. “The right to vote is sacred, and no administration should be allowed to put that right in jeopardy by making it harder for eligible voters to cast their ballots.
“This fight is far from over. We are exploring our legal options.”
Similarly, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro pledged, “We’ll see the Trump Administration in court.”
“Not so fast,” the democratic swing-state governor wrote on X after the Supreme Court ruling. “Today’s SCOTUS decision does NOT deal with the substance of Trump’s unconstitutional Executive Order and does not mean his illegal attempt to restrict mail-in voting will go forward.
“Donald Trump does not run elections here in Pennsylvania — or in any state.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called the ruling “a disgrace” and likened it to thrusting a “dagger into the heart of our democracy.”
“Trump’s effort to turn the Postal Service into a voter suppression machine is blatantly unconstitutional – yet his MAGA Supreme Court is refusing to stop it from going forward,” Schumer raged on X. “Trump’s malicious effort to stop mail-in voting is nothing but election interference in broad daylight.”
Trump’s executive order calls for the creation of a list of eligible voters and directed the US Postal Service (USPS) to deliver mail ballots only to people on those lists.
“I believe it’s foolproof, and maybe it’ll be tested. Maybe it won’t,” Trump said at the signing ceremony. “It’s about voter integrity; we want to have honest voting in our country.”
The order called for the Department of Homeland Security, working in conjunction with the Social Security Administration, to create the voter lists. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice is tasked with investigating any wrongdoing in mail-in ballot distribution.
States that disobey the order may lose federal funds.
The USPS on Friday published a rule that would require states to provide them with lists of voters who received mail-in ballots at least 60 days before the midterm elections.
Under the rule, the Postal Service will not send mail ballots from any state that does not comply with Trump’s order.
When the rule was proposed in June, USPS Postmaster General David Steiner said it would allow his agency to “match the ballots that a state believes they’re sending out to what actually gets sent out.”
Trump has long been a staunch critic of mail-in voting, despite using the process himself to cast an absentee ballot in last week’s Florida primary election.
The president and his allies argue mail-in voting is susceptible to fraud.
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Apple Users Beware: ChatGPT’s Newest Mac Feature Could Pose a Major Privacy Risk
OpenAI’s new iMessage integration is a massive time-saver for personal use, but granting the AI access to your contacts and data could be a nightmare for company security
OpenAI keeps building on the capabilities of ChatGPT with the goal of making it a kind of “everything” app, and while some tweaks bring fascinating new tools to users, others bring novel security and privacy concerns. One new ChatGPT innovation falls in the latter category, since it may trigger business owners’ worries about data leaking out: ChatGPT can now control Apple’s Messages texting system on Macs.
OpenAI announced the feature in an X post that suggests that “Everyday conversations just got easier” thanks to the new plugin power, which lets you “Search messages, catch up on conversations, draft and send replies” using ChatGPT on Mac computers.
An accompanying video clip includes a handy example, where a user asks the chatbot to suggest if there are to-do items they need to catch up on from Messages. The AI works for a brief while, then reports it found an upcoming social event and even automatically drafts a suitable reply. The user then tweaks the reply, and clicks a “continue” button which commands the app to send the text via Messages just as if it were any normal human-crafted SMS. OpenAI also suggests other uses like “Check my calendar and reply to [name] with a few times I’m free for dinner next week,” and “Find birthdays in @ messages and add them to my calendar.”
As a frequent Messages user, it looks like a convenient and time-saving tool to deal with texts arriving to your personal inbox. Though it only works on Macs for now, Messages is an integrated Apple service that works across all your Apple devices—meaning these ChatGPT-sourced text replies will be visible on connected iPhones and iPads.
But Macs are very popular business tools. And while the cheerful use cases OpenAI suggests for the new Messages integration are clearly aimed at personal users, with a few tweaks it’s easy to imagine a host of business applications. Prompts like “find me a time for a client dinner with X company on Wednesday and message them please,” for example.
And it’s exactly at this point that privacy and security-conscious readers may begin to worry. To enable the new plugin, which is available in OpenAI’s business-centric ChatGPT Work app and its software-writing system Codex, users have to change certain privacy-related Mac settings, Bloomberg reports. This includes giving ChatGPT access to names and details of contacts stored on your Mac, as well as giving the app deeper access to parts of your computer like its disk storage.
Apple has defended and extended its reputation as being user privacy-centric for many years—even tussling with the FBI about unlocking a user’s iPhone—and it promises that in many cases it can’t even access user data saved on its servers. Allowing OpenAI’s powerful but controversial chatbot free reign to scan, analyze and send messages, and to access a user’s contact list should trigger questions about how safe that data is in OpenAI’s hands.
After all, generative AI systems are known to leak information, and the company has previously been embroiled in a few user data leaks. Security-conscious CEOs may well worry about their all-important client lists being uploaded to OpenAI’s servers, or even that a rogue AI process could send damaging messages directly to clients or other employees from one worker’s computer.
Microsoft waded into similarly risky AI waters back in 2024 with its desktop Recall feature that essentially watched a PC user’s desktop and could let them wind-back time to, for example, find where they’d saved a lost file a few hours earlier in their workflow. It was a useful trick, but Recall’s release made many critics wary of the way it could see, for example, sensitive company data on a user’s computer. And then security researchers showed the service could be easily hacked.
Tech-savvy company leaders may see the benefits of enabling this kind of messaging connection to ChatGPT on their workers’ Macs. Others will note that the new tool is another reminder that staff training on what is and isn’t safe to type into third party AI chatbots could well be overdue: Data show a high percentage of workers use AI in unofficial ways to speed their day, and even use banned AI systems without much thought about the security risks.
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