At New York I waded into the multiple issues involving the U.S. Postal Service’s handling of mail ballots, which is an issue Democrats need to understand.
As the name suggests, “voting by mail” requires some cooperation from the U.S. Postal Service. And the New York Times reports that there are some disturbing signs USPS may not be entirely up to the job in this year’s midterm elections, even if Donald Trump’s vast plans for making it a choke point over mail ballots don’t come to fruition:
“The rate at which mail votes have been rejected for arriving late has ticked up in primaries this year and general elections last year in roughly a dozen states, prompting election officials to worry that the U.S. Postal Service is ill-equipped to deliver ballots in the fall midterms.
“The states studied by The New York Times include some of the most critical battleground House and Senate seats where control of Congress will be determined, as well as key races for governor and secretary of state …
“The increase is particularly striking when comparing primaries in 2024 and this year. In Michigan’s primary earlier this month, more than 10,000 mail ballots were rejected for arriving after the state’s deadline of 8 p.m. on Election Day. That is nearly double the number of ballots rejected in 2024.”
The problem appears to be a generic snail-mail issue rather than anything specifically related to ballots:
“As part of a 10-year-plan established in 2021 to shore up the Postal Service’s finances through structural changes, the agency set up regional distribution centers to process mail and increased the delivery standards for first-class mail, from three days to five.
“The Postal Service further slowed down mail in 2024 when it implemented a centralized system that postmarks mail when it reaches regional centers, not when it first enters the mail stream. The delay has particularly affected mail voting, especially in states that rely on postmarks to determine if a ballot is valid.”
Whatever problems USPS would otherwise have in getting ballots to voters and then back to election officials pales in comparison to Trump’s scheme for placing this ever-struggling quasi-public entity at the center of a new system of voter-eligibility determinations. In a much-ridiculed March 2026 executive order, which asserted some previously unknown presidential authority to run elections, Trump ordered USPS to refuse to deliver mail ballots that aren’t pre-vetted by immigration authorities to prevent noncitizen voting, as NPR explained at the time:
“It instructs the Department of Homeland Security, working in conjunction with the Social Security Administration, to ‘compile and transmit to the chief election official of each State a list of individuals confirmed to be United States citizens who will be above the age of 18 at the time of an upcoming Federal election and who maintain a residence in the subject State.’
“The order then ‘requires the USPS to transmit ballots only to individuals enrolled on a State-specific Mail-in and Absentee Participation List, ensuring that only eligible absentee or mail-in voters receive absentee or mail-in ballots,’ according to a White House fact sheet.”
Being in no position to roll their eyes at this instruction, USPS officials began putting together a regulatory framework for its new election administration task, as Democratic-governed states and voter advocates sued to stop the scheme. In June, a Massachusetts federal district judge put a hold on implementation of Trump’s orders. Then on August 11 the U.S. Supreme Court raised many eyebrows by setting aside the judge’s hold on the highly technical grounds that USPS plans weren’t final enough to be reviewed by the judiciary. Since then, the Postal Service’s rules (including a requirement for use of a very particular kind of envelope for conveyance of mail ballots) were indeed made final, and the same Massachusetts judge imposed another hold on its implementation.
“The impact would likely fall harder on older and more Democratic voters. A Pew Research Center study found that 44% of Democratic candidates’ voters cast ballots by mail or absentee in 2024, compared with 26% of Republican candidates’ voters. Trump, a frequent mail voter himself, has repeatedly blamed mail votes for his 2020 electoral loss.”
It’s hard to imagine the Supreme Court fully okaying these plans, but it’s possible the conservative majority will accept claims that USPS is just regulating envelopes rather than the ballots they contain or the voters who cast them. At this late date, though, anything other than a flat Supreme Court quashing of Trump’s executive order is likely to sow chaos in state midterm-election plans, which may be the administration’s real object.
If nothing else, avoiding the prospect of a total upheaval of the imminent elections could desensitize Trump critics to the less gargantuan but still significant threat of many thousands of mail ballots being tossed due to slow mail delivery. Trump’s Republicans need every little advantage they can get in November. Snail mail could provide another one.
