The Postal Service told a federal judge its online ballot-verification system would be ready by the week of September 6. It is now September 11, the portal has not appeared, and the Justice Department is at the Supreme Court seeking emergency permission to force every state into compliance.
The dispute centers on a rule USPS finalized in late August following a March 31 executive order President Trump titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.” Under the rule, mail ballots must carry unique barcodes and an official USPS logo, and state election officials must upload the names and addresses of every voter eligible to vote by mail to a federal portal. If a state doesn’t comply, USPS will refuse to deliver its ballots.
Steven Monteith, the Postal Service’s chief customer and marketing officer, told U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in a September 3 court filing that the agency was still making “refinements” to the portal and anticipated it would be available for voluntary use “by sometime next week.” That week passed with no portal. According to Democracy Docket, a voting-rights legal organization founded by Democratic lawyer Marc Elias, the American Postal Workers Union, AFL-CIO — which represents more than 200,000 postal employees — told the court this week that workers who would be central to checking ballot envelopes and verifying voter data have not received training on the system.
North Carolina is set to begin mailing absentee ballots Friday, with several other states scheduled to follow later this month. Most of those envelopes were designed before the portal existed and under the assumption the rule remained blocked.
Talwani, who sits in Boston, blocked the rule in late August, finding it “likely unconstitutional” and the compliance timeline “practically impossible” — states would need to redesign ballots, seek USPS approval, update election management systems, train staff, and upload citizen data, all within roughly 60 days of November. The difficulties are already visible: elections officials in Leon County, Florida, had their ballot envelope initially rejected over a spacing error of 0.014 of an inch, Democracy Docket reported; USPS relented only after the supervisor filed an appeal. A whistleblower disclosure submitted to Sen. Richard Blumenthal warned of “potentially catastrophic problems” with the postal verification system, including a threshold that could prevent large numbers of ballots from reaching voters.
At a Thursday hearing, Talwani pushed back on a suggestion from Missouri’s solicitor general that some states be allowed to comply voluntarily. “We’re not playing an intellectual puzzle game. We’re talking about people’s right to vote,” she said.
Rather than waiting for the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to act, the Justice Department went directly to the Supreme Court this week to seek an immediate lift of the block. “USPS’s mail ballot rule is an unconstitutional attempt to upend mail voting on the eve of an election,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, which represents some of the challengers. The administration has not presented evidence of widespread fraud; studies and audits show non-citizen voting is “incredibly rare,” NPR reported.
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in August on a procedural question in a related case but has not yet addressed the merits of the mail voting restrictions. Whether it grants the emergency stay will determine whether millions of Americans can vote by mail this November under the rules their states have long used.