Fifth Circuit Panel Restores Nine Texas SB 1 Voting Provisions on Standing Grounds Weeks Before Midterms

A unanimous Fifth Circuit panel ruled on August 12, 2026 to reverse a federal injunction that had blocked nine provisions of Texas Senate Bill 1, the 2021 election law, restoring mail-ballot ID matching requirements and voter-assistance oath rules with the November midterms roughly twelve weeks out. Under SB 1, a voter must supply an identification number — a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number — on both the mail-ballot application and the returned ballot, and the two must match the number on file. A federal judge in San Antonio had struck the ID requirements down in March 2025. The panel reversed the district court in its entirety, and Judge Andrew Oldham’s eleven-page opinion rested the reversal principally on standing rather than on the merits, finding the plaintiffs lacked it on most of their claims. Attorney General Ken Paxton called the ruling a major victory.

The standing holding is the part with reach beyond Texas. The plaintiffs included voters with disabilities bringing claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act; the district court had found the provisions harmed them. A ruling that such plaintiffs cannot establish standing to challenge voting restrictions does not merely restore nine Texas provisions — it narrows the doorway through which future ADA challenges to voting restrictions anywhere in the Fifth Circuit must pass. Roughly three million Texans have disabilities. Oldham noted that appellate judges had reversed the district court on everything across the suit’s five years, which is a description of the litigation’s history and also of how much of it survives.

The timing is the pattern. Restoring nine provisions in August for a November election gives plaintiffs no realistic window to litigate back before the ballots that matter are cast, which places the ruling alongside the corpus’s other pre-midterm election-law moves: the administration racing to the shadow docket on mail-ballot restrictions (2026-07-28–trump-races-scotus-shadow-docket-mail-ballot-restrictions) and winning a stay that lifted the block on the mail-ballot executive order (2026-08-24–scotus-shadow-docket-stay-lifts-block-trump-mail-ballot-eo); USPS moving to withhold mail ballots from states refusing to hand over voter rolls (2026-06-24–steiner-usps-withhold-mail-ballots-from-states-refusing-voter-rolls); DOJ’s national voter database drawing compliance from twelve states while five suits were dismissed (2026-08-06–aclu-doj-voter-database-12-states-complied-5-suits-dismissed), all downstream of the March 2025 voter-list executive order (2026-03-31–trump-voter-list-executive-order). Texas is simultaneously among the six states scheduling August special sessions to redraw congressional maps after Callais (2026-08-15–six-republican-states-schedule-august-special-sessions-post-vra-redistricting). The map and the ballot access are being adjusted in the same quarter, before the same election.