A Mail Voting Fight About Nothing

By Stephen Richer

Wednesday, September 09, 2026

 

On Sunday, the Trump administration made its third appeal in less than six weeks to the Supreme Court, seeking to move ahead with implementing a role for the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) in overseeing mail ballots as some blue states try to block it.

 

Setting aside the legal back-and-forth, the strange thing about the saga is that even if implemented, the USPS list-matching rule—the item at dispute in the litigation—would do nothing for election integrity. There’s been lots of talk about election law, the president’s powers, whether the postal service can actually execute the role the president has tasked it with, and whether election administrators could handle the last-minute change. But overlooked in all the discussions is the fact that the administration is pursuing a change that will do nothing to make our elections more secure.

 

Before we get to that, some background: On March 31, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity In Federal Elections.” Section 3 of the order directed the U.S. Postal Service to take unprecedented steps to inject itself into election administration. The order gave the postal service until the end of May to issue proposed rules to effectuate the president’s wishes.

 

Previously, the USPS has treated election offices like any other customer. So long as election officials submitted appropriately addressed and stamped outbound envelopes containing mail ballots, the USPS would deliver them to voters. Under the executive order, USPS will not deliver mail ballots unless the outbound envelope has a certain new design and contains tracking elements, and unless election officials submit to USPS in advance the names and addresses of all mail-ballot voters.  

 

Public interest groups and Democratic-led states sued less than a week after Trump issued the order. They argued, among other things, that the Constitution doesn’t permit the president to unilaterally change election law nor direct the post office to do things outside of its statutory authority. Throughout the summer, a U.S. district judge in Massachusetts, Indira Talwani, issued injunctive orders against the administration, which appealed her orders to the Supreme Court.

 

As the litigation continued, USPS issued a proposed rule, and then, after receiving more than 200,000 public comments in response, issued a final rule on August 21. Three days later, the Supreme Court ruled that plaintiffs had filed their original April lawsuits too soon. The suits, according to the Supreme Court, were premised on speculative harm, rather than actual harm, because the USPS had not issued its final rule at the time of initial lawsuits.  

 

The plaintiffs shrugged their shoulders in response to this ruling and then filed a new lawsuit based on the USPS’s August 21 final rulemaking. Judge Talwani issued a temporary restraining order against the Trump administration and USPS on August 27 and a preliminary injunction on September 4. The Trump administration appealed directly to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court set a briefing schedule for this week.    

 

The ballot’s in the mail—or is it?

 

All this comes as election season is already underway. North Carolina mailed out ballots last week—60 days before Election Day, as required by state law. Plenty of other states will join them in the coming weeks. And federal law requires that military and overseas ballots (“UOCAVA” ballots) go out at least 45 days before Election Day.

 

Even if the Supreme Court ultimately deems the new USPS requirements lawful, the idea that election officials could fully implement them for this upcoming election is absurd. Tammy Patrick—the chief programs officer of the Elections Center, a national organization that trains and certifies elections administrators—explains what the new restrictions on mail voting would mean for election officials in her 63-page declaration accompanying the plaintiffs’ suit.  

 

Patrick points out to the court that there are more than 10,000 voting jurisdictions in the United States, some with zero full-time election workers. A number of these jurisdictions still hand-address their outbound mail ballot packets. It’s silly to think those offices can, in a matter of days, redesign their envelopes, buy new envelopes, destroy old envelopes, address the new envelopes, assemble new mail ballot packets, and learn how to use a new USPS portal.  

 

Then there’s the question of whether or not USPS could keep up its end of the bargain. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, made news earlier this month when he released a report from an anonymous USPS whistleblower who called the postal service’s effort to comply with the order “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed,” according to a letter Blumenthal sent to the postmaster general. The whistleblower’s colleagues had a coarser description: “s—tshow.” ProPublica has also reported on concerns from within USPS that large numbers of eligible voters could face significant delays in receiving their ballots or perhaps not receive them at all.

 

The larger legal questions surrounding the litigation are simply the latest version in the omnipresent question of the past 1.5 years: “Does the president have this unilateral power?”  Although I’m a lawyer, I predominantly stay in the lane of a humble election administrator. And from the point of view of an election administration expert, it’s far from clear how these changes further the cause of making our elections secure.

 

Unclear objectives.

 

Most news coverage and commentary has focused on the section of the executive order that requires election officials to submit lists of all mail voters to the USPS before handing over the actual addressed ballot packets for delivery by mail carriers. According to the final USPS rule, the USPS will compare the addressees on mail ballot packets with the submitted list. If the addressee is on the list, the USPS will deliver the mail ballot packet. If the addressee is not on the list, the USPS will not deliver the mail ballot packet (and, potentially, none of the other mail ballots in that batch).

 

But that’s the extent of the USPS role. It’s charged with simply comparing two lists: the presubmitted list and the actual ballot packets. Even if the Supreme Court upholds the executive order, the USPS will not do anything to assess the validity of the mail voters on the submitted list. It won’t check to see if the addressees are real people. It won’t check to see if they’re U.S. citizens, or if they really live at that address, or if the recipient is registered to vote in multiple states, or even if they’re registered in two houses on the same street.  

 

The USPS acknowledges in its own FAQ that it has no role in determining the eligibility of mail voters beyond confirming they are on the presubmitted list:

 

The List will not be based on external sources of information, such as federal databases. It will be based exclusively on the information provided by each state’s chief election official or their designees. The Postal Service will not compare Portal data to any other internal or external source or change the information on its own.

 

The administration has made similar acknowledgments in its court filings, including with the Supreme Court: “USPS will not perform any verification of voter eligibility or the like.” In other words, election officials could give the USPS mail ballot packets addressed to fraudulent recipients, but as long as those fraudulent recipients are also on the presubmitted list, then the USPS won’t do anything about it. “Garbage out” is okay, as long as it matches the “garbage in.”

 

Some election integrity advocates noticed the rule’s inherent impotence. When publishing the final rule to the Federal Register, the USPS wrote, “some commenters urged the Postal Service to adopt additional measures, including citizenship-verification requirements, as part of a final rule.”   

 

And yet you wouldn’t know this based on commentary from the administration and MAGA’s most strident election skeptics. When the Supreme Court made its initial determination that the original suits challenging the executive order had been filed too soon, Trump posted to social media: “Supreme Court Delivers Major Election Integrity Victory in Big Win for Trump.” Sen. Mike Lee wrote on X: “An outstanding victory for election security across America”—a comment that earned him a “community note” correction for misconstruing the court’s ruling.

 

None of these people have explained how matching two lists—both provided by the same election administrators whom Trump has distrusted for many years—specifically improves election security. I suppose one could argue that it creates an additional public record of all mail voters, but that information is already public. You can, for example, make a public records request for a file to see every voter in Arizona who received a mail ballot in 2024 and every voter who returned a mail ballot in that election.

 

Heck, if I were still the chief election official in Maricopa County, Arizona, I would just submit my entire voter registration roll to USPS. That way, if a voter who is not originally set to receive a mail ballot later decides he wants a mail ballot, he’s already on the USPS list. There’s no penalty for oversubmitting potential voters to the postal service.

 

A placebo effect, or worse.  

 

When pressed in court on how the rule enhances election integrity, the administration has said it builds confidence in elections. As far as election administrators are concerned, this is all an expensive, administratively cumbersome, legally fraught placebo. The USPS will create a new portal containing the names and addresses of all mail voters, and state and local administrators will jump through a bunch of new hoops, not because it will do anything real, but because it will make people feel better.

 

It’s especially silly when states like Alabama and Texas say they want to voluntarily comply with the USPS rule, even if the executive order is deemed unlawful. If they wanted to, they could simply post a list of all mail voters on a state elections website. But I suspect this is less about actual election integrity and more about MAGA exhibitionism and the need to be seen as fighting for election integrity.

 

If this is all about improving public confidence in mail voting, I’d suggest there’s a quicker, less expensive, less legally fraught way to do that: Trump could simply announce on Truth Social that he trusts the security of mail voting, having used it himself, and that even after aggressively pursuing noncitizen voter fraud for months, his federal investigators have turned up only a few cases.

 

But that, of course, won’t happen. So what’s this push really about?

 

Here I can only speculate. Perhaps the Trump administration wants a federal “in” to election administration. The executive order is merely the beachhead, and the involvement of USPS in election administration, once firmly established, will expand in future elections. In those future elections, USPS will check the eligibility of all mail voters. It will run citizen checks.  

 

Another theory is that with election integrity initiatives like the SAVE America Act having stalled, Trump is building a pretext by which to cry foul when the upcoming election is administered in the same way the 2024 presidential election was administered. Oh, the irony.

 

And then there’s the chaos-for-the-sake-of-chaos theory. Andy Craig at The UnPopulist summarized this theory as envisioned by Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times:

 

[L]ose in the lower courts, stall, then declare the results in noncompliant states fraudulent, so a new Democratic majority takes office under a manufactured cloud. On that reading, the chaos and collapse are not the plan’s failings, they are the real purpose of it. Nor is it an isolated action.

 

I don’t know what the real reason is. Or if there’s any reason at all.

 

All I know is that it’s a darn shame that all of this effort is being invested in litigating, stressing out election administrators and USPS employees alike, and building a USPS portal that, even if fully and smoothly implemented, will do nothing to improve the integrity of American elections.