Election officials in nearly half the states are warning the courts that implementing the U.S. Postal Service’s new mail ballot rule would cause significant turmoil in their plans for the midterm elections, with plenty of signs voters would lose their chance to vote.
In declarations filed in a lawsuit seeking to halt the ballot rule, the officials detail how the rule comes late in the process, squeezes deadlines for sending out ballots and clashes with long-standing state election laws and carefully timed procedures.
“It is currently less than a week from when we need to provide our mailing list to our print and mail vendor,” said Sarah Hanzas, the secretary of state in Vermont, where there is universal vote-by-mail. “My staff, the city and town clerks, and the vendor have not seen or been trained on the new USPS system. We are not alone in this lack of knowledge.”
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Massachusetts temporarily blocked the executive order late Thursday for 14 days, a decision the Trump administration has appealed.
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North Carolina is supposed to begin sending out ballots Friday. Marc Brunton, an assistant deputy attorney general, was among the election officials who pointed out the rule would require jurisdictions to submit envelope designs to USPS and receive feedback.
“Given the very short time available and the untested technology that the Rule relies on, I have profound concerns that the Rule will prevent eligible voters from voting, including in the November 2026 general election,” Brunton said in the court filings.
States will have to upload the name and address of every eligible voter, as well as a unique “Intelligent Mail” barcode to the USPS Ballot Portal — a system that election staff will need to be trained to use. And they won’t be able to enroll voters in bulk.
“Elections officials will not only be required to process these mailings within their own systems, but they will bear the added burden of processing mailings in an entirely new system operated by USPS — about which officials currently have no concrete operational information,” Brunton said. “If the system fails, North Carolina may be unable to mail ballots to voters at all.”
Alongside the privacy concerns associated with sending out voter information, intelligence mail barcodes cost money, especially at the scale that states require.
These are all steps, election officials say, that will be costly and timely. Several states have already ordered ballots that do not comply with the executive order. Others have never used intelligent mail barcodes.
In Hawaii, the chief election officer pointed out the kind of unique logistical challenges facing election officials.
“The new USPS rule would require us to throw out the previously ordered size 10 envelopes, at a cost of over $79,000.00, as they were already printed with a static Intelligent Mail Barcode for each county clerk,” Scott Nago said in a declaration. “It may not be possible to get new orders of size 10 envelopes delivered to Hawaii from the continent on such short notice.”
Delays are another concern — one that has plagued previous elections. Whether states accept mail-in ballots after Election Day or not, some have already complained about the delays in election mail prior to the USPS taking on the responsibility of sorting through which citizens are or are not eligible.
USPS has also said it does not plan “to require additional staff” to take on this responsibility.
Mandy Vigil, state election director in New Mexico, was among the officials who pointed out that voter lists will continue to change ahead of Election Day, with new registrations, current registrations being modified or existing registrations canceled for people moving or dying.
“As such, any ‘point-in-time’ eligible list provided by the federal government agencies will not match New Mexico’s dynamic voter list,” Vigil said. “Having inconsistent eligible voter lists will cause confusion, disenfranchise large numbers of New Mexico voters, and create chaos for the election administrators.”
Nevada’s deputy secretary of state, Mark Wlaschin, highlighted a part of the final rule from the USPS that says the data collection will be used to enable “law enforcement to better detect potential issues meriting further investigation,” an unprecedented tactic that he says could make voters wary.
“The threat of disclosing such information to law enforcement officials itself could suppress voter participation,” Wlaschin said in a declaration. “And each of the process changes create delay and administrative burden at each step, creating dangerous bottlenecks in the short time before elections that increase the risks of cascading impacts and disenfranchisement at an alarming scale.”
Advocates worry that the sheer confusion behind these wavering court decisions, or the potential implementation of the final rule with the court’s permission, could confuse already vulnerable voters. Nearly one-third of Americans voted by mail in the 2024 presidential election.
Joanna Southard, assistant chief of California’s Elections Division, was among other officials who said in the declarations that access to mail-in voting is especially important for rural and disabled voters. States mail ballots to eligible, active registered voters who are out of the state on Election Day because they are in college, traveling or in the military.
Southard said that of the 9.4 million people who voted in the state’s primary this year, 89% of them voted by mail. The sheer capacity of the changes such a large state would have to make could debilitate eligible voters.
“That Rule is causing and will imminently cause significant harm, confusion, and disruption in California’s election administration, and will impose unrecoverable costs on California,” Southard wrote.
Later, she added, “Even if USPS’s untested Ballot Portal works as intended and does not experience technical problems — which seems unlikely given the short development and implementation window — enrolling all 23 million voters with USPS will be a massive undertaking.”
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