Plaintiffs on Monday filed an appeal of the decision not to block President Donald Trump’s executive order (EO) directed at placing restrictions on voting by mail. The appeal is the latest development in the fight by advocacy organizations to stop the Trump administration from reshaping the mail-in ballot guidelines ahead of the November midterm elections.

In the EO, Trump directed the US Postal Service (USPS) to generate lists of eligible voters and only deliver ballots to those individuals. Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Social Security Administration (SSA) were instructed to create lists of adult citizens that maintain a presence in each state using federal databases unrelated to voting, sparking backlash from voters’ rights organizations.

The decision not to block the EO, delivered last week by Trump-appointed US District Judge Carl Nichols, declined to grant the plaintiff’s request for a preliminary injunction, a form of relief that would have temporarily paused the effects of the EO while the case continued. As neither USPS, DHS, nor SSA had taken steps to implement the EO yet, Nichols denied the request for relief on the grounds of ripeness and standing, leaving the effects of the order in place.

However, he left room in the ruling for the plaintiffs to refile their claim once the agencies took steps to implement the order, which is exactly what the democratic organizations did. Their appeal comes just a few days after USPS acted pursuant to the EO.

On May 29, only one day after Nichols’ ruling, USPS issued a proposed rule carrying out the directives of the order by cracking-down on the policies for acquiring and returning mail-in ballots. They emphasized that this new rule will “apply uniform standards for the mailing of absentee ballots to and from voters,” in order to “facilitate the faithful execution of federal law.”

In the proposal, USPS requires states to submit a list of the names and addresses of all citizens receiving mail-in ballots, as well as a unique barcode tied to the voter’s outbound and return ballots. The list must be submitted to the postal service at least 30 days before the ballots are sent out under the state’s law, and if a citizen’s name is not on the list, they will not receive a ballot. This further emphasizes the fear by voters rights organizations that individuals that are registered to vote could be left off of the list due to the unreliability of the data used to compile it.

Additionally, USPS indicated that the rule will apply to all general, special, and runoff federal elections, but not to primaries or to the ballots sent to military or overseas voters.

The rule, scheduled to be published on June 2nd in the Federal Register, will be open for public comment for 30 days after its publication, pursuant to the procedure of the federal rule-making process.

As plaintiffs await a decision of their appeal in this lawsuit, attentions turn to a similar suit playing out in Boston this week.