At a dark moment for American democracy, it qualifies as a relief that the U.S. Supreme Court has finally acknowledged that the U.S. Postal Service has no legitimate role in running elections. The court’s ruling this week put a well-deserved end to President Donald Trump’s plot to interfere with the midterms by steering absentee votes to the dead-letter office. That should give voters welcome assurance that ballots mailed early enough to arrive by Election Day will be counted.

That said, the court’s all too halting response to this constitutional absurdity is an example of the institutional frailty that has enabled Trump’s assault on our laws and elections. The justices’ willingness to seriously consider such an obviously illegal attempt to suppress votes is one reason Trump can be counted on to continue his efforts to meddle with the midterms.

The president revealed his plan back in March, when he ordered the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to assemble a list of certified citizens permitted to vote by mail. By June, responding to a lawsuit by Gov. Josh Shapiro and 22 other state officials, a federal judge in Boston blocked the order for the purposes of the midterm elections. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani noted that the Constitution gives the president no authority to administer elections, which fall squarely under the purview of Congress and the states. An appellate court and a district court in Washington reached similar conclusions.

The Supreme Court’s six Republican-appointed justices nonetheless allowed the Postal Service to continue developing the plan as late as last month, finding that it was too soon to rule on the matter. It wasn’t until Monday that a majority ruled the notion too dubious and the election too imminent to allow it to proceed. Even then, three of the justices — Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh — held in separate opinions that the president and postal officials could well possess the authority to deliberately lose our votes in the mail.

By then the court had allowed this supposed legal riddle to linger unanswered for half a year, long enough that a few states had already issued mail ballots and several Republican-controlled states had joined the objectors. Despite the administration’s ultimate loss in court, some election officials fear the months of uncertainty about absentee voting — a centuries-old practice the president himself engaged in as recently as this summer — served Trump’s purposes by undermining confidence in the electoral process.

Trump is clearly determined to continue doing that by every available means.

His Justice Department has demanded access to election data, leading to largely losing litigation in more than half the states, including Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has pushed for federal investigations of voting machines and data based on groundless conspiracy theories. Administration officials have deployed federal agents to trawl the voting rolls for noncitizens and could send more to the polls to intimidate voters. And they have threatened to prosecute state election officials over illegal voting even though no such thing appears to be taking place at any scale.

These are the paroxysms of an unpopular and unscrupulous regime desperate to dodge the will of voters. The most effective response will be the sort of robust “too big to rig” turnout that overwhelms any petty trickery and begins to limit the president’s power to further undermine democracy.

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