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The Supreme Court on Monday blocked a Trump administration plan to dramatically change how Americans vote by mail in the lead-up to the midterm elections, a major loss for President Trump, who has long claimed without evidence that fraud is rampant in mail voting.

The ruling was a resounding win for Democratic-led states and voting rights groups, which had argued that the plan was unconstitutional and an existential threat to the democratic process.

When the Supreme Court blocked President Trump’s mail-vote plan on Monday night, not one of the three justices Mr. Trump appointed to the court noted any disagreement.

Nor did Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who was also nominated by a Republican president.

Instead, only Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas — the court’s two most conservative members — lodged their dissent, indicating that they would have allowed the president’s plan to reshape how the Postal Service handles mail-in ballots to move ahead.

That has been a pattern on the court since Mr. Trump returned to office, with Justices Alito and Thomas as the most reliable votes on the court for the Trump administration’s agenda.

In the term that ended in June, Justices Alito and Thomas were the only two Republican nominees who voted in favor of all three of Mr. Trump’s main priorities. In each case, they were in the minority, as the court rejected Mr. Trump’s sweeping tariffs, his proposal to limit birthright citizenship and his attempt to immediately fire a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.

In Monday’s case, voting groups and Democratic-led states had challenged the administration’s plan directing the Postal Service to screen ballot envelopes, saying it would cause chaos and confusion for voters so close to the November election. In an unsigned order, the majority said the groups were likely to prevail.

But Justice Alito called those challenges a “Hail Mary pass,” saying they were unlikely to win in further litigation because of the Postal Service’s broad authority under federal law to regulate the mail.

In his nearly eight-page dissent, Justice Alito said he would have granted the administration’s request to allow the new rules to take effect immediately, in part because he believed that the new mandates were similar to other requirements for sending mail, such as the necessity to list a recipient’s address and affix a stamp.

The government, he wrote, has “a strong interest in enforcing the rule, and implementing it will also ‘enhance the visibility of federal ballot mail’ in order to better detect election fraud.”

Mr. Trump has repeatedly insisted, without evidence, that mail-in balloting is marred by fraud.

Justice Alito acknowledged the states’ practical concerns about implementing the new rules so close to the midterm elections.

“I take that problem very seriously,” he wrote, “but it is not enough to convince me to deny the application.”

He was joined by Justice Thomas.

Monday’s order was the second time in less than a month that the Supreme Court had weighed in on the president’s plan to limit voting by mail. In late August, the justices said Mr. Trump could proceed with implementing his executive order. The groups and states that sued, they said, could not demonstrate that they would be sufficiently harmed to block the administration because the voting rules had not yet taken effect.

At the time, the justices in the majority cautioned that their 10-page order was preliminary and not a final decision about whether the president’s order would “necessarily be lawful.” The majority added: “On that score, time will tell.”

That August order was also unsigned. But back then, it was the three liberal justices who disagreed with the outcome, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warning of “chaos and uncertainty” in the upcoming election in a 23-page dissent.

On Monday, Justice Alito took aim at his Supreme Court colleagues, writing that they were in part to blame for the time crunch and concerns about implementing new rules so close to the elections. He wrote that the way the justices initially handled the case over the summer caused unnecessary delay.

The administration had said it wanted to release its final rule by early to mid-August, he explained, allowing time for it to be implemented. Ultimately, the Postal Service published the plan only on Aug. 21, as it waited for word from the Supreme Court.

“This court spent from late July to the end of August drafting nearly 40 pages of opinions, including two dissents, despite the government’s public notice that it would not publish a final rule,” while it was blocked by lower courts, he wrote.

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Election workers sort through mail-in ballots in 2024 at Maricopa County Ballot Tabulation Center in Phoenix. Credit…Rebecca Noble for The New York Times

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