INDIANAPOLIS — For the past 250 years, the United States Postal Service has been a connector, providing Americans with a reliable means of communicating and conducting commerce. It was a true uniting force. It appears to be taking on a sinister role: that of a gatekeeper with the unconstitutional power to reject mail-in ballots.
The Postal Service is now poised to divide us.
The U.S. Constitution clearly gives the 50 states and the District of Columbia authority to run our elections via 10,000 local portals, with congressional oversight. The president and the Postal Service have no constitutional role in determining who votes and how.
An executive order signed by President Donald J. Trump in March directed the Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to voters on approved lists maintained by the federal government using newly designed envelopes with mandatory barcodes. It also ordered the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to compile citizenship lists. Some 20 states, including Indiana, complied with a request to share that data; 30 states and the District did not. The Department of Justice is 0-23 in cases against the non-complying states in federal courts.
The final Postal Service rule established last week “makes clear that the Postal Service will generally not accept Outbound Federal Ballot mailings unless compliance with the rule’s new standards has been verified,” according to Democracy Docket.
In other words, if states don’t submit redesigned mail ballot envelopes for Postal Service approval and hand over the name and address of every voter who might use a mail-in ballot, mail carriers won’t deliver them, according to Democracy Docket. That could shut off the ballot-casting method used by nearly 47 million voters in 2024, or roughly 30% of the electorate.
That uncertainty comes as early voting will begin in several states in mid-September. Early voting starts Oct. 6 in Indiana, less than five weeks away. The changes are throwing a chaotic curveball at state and local election administrators and millions of voters who have reliably cast ballots in what an array of bipartisan officials and studies have deemed free and fair elections.
While this situation could drastically affect the seven states that automatically send voters mail-in ballots — California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and Vermont — it could deprive thousands of Hoosiers of their most sacred right (and rite) in our democracy: to vote in a variety of ways described in the Indiana Code.
In the 2024 general election, Indiana sent out 1.6 million absentee or mail-in ballots, with a minuscule rejection rate of 0.2%, according to the secretary of state’s office. In 2022, Indiana accepted 178,065 absentee ballots, including about 149,000 early in-person votes and nearly 41,000 mail-ins. During the COVID-19 pandemic, there were more than 275,000 absentee ballot requests for the June 2020 primary election, more than five times as many as in 2016. Some 1.9 million Hoosiers voted by absentee ballot in the 2020 general election out of 3,068,542 ballots cast.
A Pew Research Center study shows that 44% of Democratic voters cast ballots by mail or absentee in 2024, compared with 26% of Republican voters.
In a federal court filing, the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts observed, “USPS has no such authority. The Final Rule both assigns USPS an unprecedented gatekeeping role in the administration of mail voting, intruding on the constitutional authority of the states and Congress.”
This week, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn, released a whistleblower report from a Postal Service employee warning of “potentially catastrophic problems in the development of the United States Postal Service’s new system for handling federal election ballot mail.”
The whistleblower said this “process for the creation and implementation of an entirely new and untested set of IT systems” for delivering ballots to voters for the midterm election has been “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed.”
“[T]he administration has hidden the high likelihood that the new ballot mail verification processes will result in major disruptions in mail ballots ever getting delivered to voters,” the employee added, according to the report.
Janessa Goldbeck, a Marine Corps veteran and CEO of Vet Voice Foundation, observes, “For millions of Americans, voting by mail is not a convenience. It is the only practical way to participate. For active-duty service members stationed around the world, international mail is slow and unpredictable. Military families move constantly. Veterans living with disabilities rely on absentee voting.”
Trump told The New York Times in January he regretted not having sent the U.S. military to seize voting machines after his defeat in the 2020 election. He has repeatedly assailed voting by mail as fraudulent, even though he votes that way.
Marc Elias of the Democracy Docket observed Wednesday, “What the whistleblower and others see as a serious flaw in the system is — I am virtually certain — viewed by the White House as one of its primary virtues.”
The goal, Elias suggested, is to create enough chaos in the November elections to discredit the entire process.
What’s my take on all this?
The whistleblower cited a “sloppy and rushed” process, which matches the M.O. of Trump 2.0, where his designed-on-the-back-of-an-envelope “Liberation Day” tariffs were scrapped after a week because the global bond market began tanking. Trump’s monthslong war with Iran (opposed by most of his cabinet other than Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth) has become a logistical, military, economic and political cul-de-sac.
New Postal Service “rules” sprung on state and local election officials at the eleventh hour — what could possibly go wrong?
Brian A. Howey is an opinion columnist for State Affairs Indiana and the founder of Howey Politics Indiana. His writing offers analysis and opinion shaped by decades of experience covering Indiana politics. Email him at howey@stateaffairs.com.
