DEMOCRACY WATCHWhy the Rushed Postal Service Plan for Mail-in Voting has States in a Panic
President Donald Trump’s executive order placing new restrictions on mail-in voting would assign state officials a Herculean task to reach compliance before the crucial midterm elections.
President Donald Trump’s executive order placing new restrictions on mail-in voting would assign state officials a Herculean task to reach compliance before the crucial midterm elections.
The order directed the U.S. Postal Service to strictly regulate the envelope design of mail-in ballots and to collect voter data from each state through an online portal, among other things.
The Postal Service has argued in court that its rule is not an election regulation, but is within the agency’s purview as a standard for a specific type of mail.
But some state officials tasked with fitting their systems to the new regulations say it presents massive — if not impossible — challenges to reach compliance for the November midterms, when voters will decide whether to continue Republican control of the U.S. House and Senate.
Ballot designs and printing are typically done months in advance of ballots being sent to voters, which begins this week. North Carolina is set to mail out ballots for the Nov. 3 general election on Friday.
“In some States, it would be impossible at this point to comply with the last-minute rollout of USPS’ novel ballot-verification program,” more than 20 Democratic-led states suing to block the order said in a Wednesday court filing. “In other States, there will be chaos.”
The states presented a list of tasks state and local elections administrators would have to complete.
That list includes: redesigning ballot envelopes and obtaining USPS approval “on an unprecedented timetable,” purchasing new envelopes, developing technological systems to meet barcode standards in the rule, uploading voter-specific information to the USPS portal that they have not yet received access to and training state and local officials and voters on the new standards.
“Each step of this process is fraught with an extreme risk of error,” they said.
‘Courts Will Stop It’
Because of the unworkable timeline and a general principle not to change voting policy too close to an election, officials believe courts will ultimately block the rule from going into effect for this year.
“There’s a pretty universal feeling that the courts will stop it from happening,” Katy Owens Hubler, the director of elections at the National Conference of State Legislatures, said in an interview.
