This is enough to make your hair stand on end. The United States Post Office is busy implementing plans to limit mail-in voting, which would have the net effect of disenfranchising a lot of people. And this is happening now, with the 2026 midterms looming in November.
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) said in a yet-to-be-published proposed rule Friday that it’s drawing up plans to radically crack down on mail voting by sending ballots only to voters who are registered with the federal government.
The proposed rule, which will be formally published next week, is an alarming step toward implementing President Donald Trump’s sweeping attack on mail voting ahead of the 2026 midterm election. And it would represent a massive expansion of federal control over voting, without congressional authorization.
Trump signed a sweeping executive order in March that, in part, ordered the Postal Service to only send mail ballots to voters on lists created and controlled by the federal government.
The order is currently the subject of multiple lawsuits. USPS’s proposed rule came a day after a federal judge overseeing one of the lawsuits declined to block the order. The judge concluded the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the order since federal agencies had not yet taken steps to implement it.
Now, that appears to have changed.
USPS is moving forward with the order even though legal experts and voting rights organizations have warned that it is a blatantly unconstitutional attempt to restrict the right to vote and usurp states’ authority over elections.
Under the Constitution, states run elections and only Congress can set national standards.
The proposed rule would require state election officials to send USPS a list of voters who have requested a mail-in or absentee ballot at least 30 days before ballots are sent out under state law. If voters aren’t on the list, they will not receive a ballot.
It also allows state officials to make “supplemental submissions to enroll additional individuals or modify prior submissions until the last day that ballots may be mailed out to individuals under state law.”
In this way, that provision tacitly admits that it will lead to errors that need to be fixed, whether through “supplemental submissions” or modifying “prior submissions.”
Those errors, caused by a new federal government program that is not explicitly authorized by Congress, are precisely the kind of harm the plaintiffs challenging the executive order seek to prevent.
In their lawsuits, Democrats and voting-rights advocates argued that using USPS’s list, as well as other federal registration lists included in Trump’s order, would lead to eligible voters being unable to cast ballots. In part, that’s because the lists would rely on Department of Homeland Security databases that have been shown to have serious flaws.
This is opening up a can of worms. This issue looks to be something so controversial that it may end up going to the Supreme Court. What happened to the Republicans who wanted to “bank votes” via mail-in ballots? Where did they disappear to? Even Kellyanne Conway was on that bandwagon back in 2020.
