Checkpoint: Mail-In Voting And Trump’s Voter Suppression
J Studios
A key characteristic of the Trump Administration, present since the very beginning in 2016, has been distrust in elections. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote while Donald Trump still won the presidency, and even way back then, Trump was vocally disbelieving of the results. Since 2016, Trump has been staging all kinds of attacks on the mechanisms and integrity of our elections, from allegations of widespread voter fraud, to the attack on the Capitol on January 6th, 2021 to stop Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election. His appointees and cabinet members aren’t even allowed to say he lost in 2020. Rather, they’re forced to show fealty by saying only that President Biden was “certified” the winner of the 2020 election. This is all part of a grand plan to sow distrust among voters in our electoral process, which is very dangerous.
Trump’s latest victim is mail-in voting. Mail-in voters tend to lean Democratic, and Trump has decided that this critical voting service is an easy target for suppression. Never mind that a large proportion of mail-in voters are elderly, disabled people, or those in rural areas, i.e. more vulnerable populations. On March 31, 2026, Trump issued an executive order restricting mail-in voting. The order, titled “ENSURING CITIZENSHIP VERIFICATION AND INTEGRITY IN FEDERAL ELECTIONS,” requires that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Social Security Administration, and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services are also directed to compile a list of confirmed U.S. citizens. The order directs the U.S. attorney general to investigate election officials using any list but the newly-compiled one for the executive order. The order also places the onus of policing and regulating the mail-in ballots upon the USPS, and mandates that the USPS compiles and submits state-specific mail-in and absentee participation lists, institutes a federal mail-in and absentee ballot portal, and outlines procedures for verifying each state's compliance with approved voter lists and ballot envelope design requirements. Under this order, the USPS is only permitted to send mail-in or absentee ballots to individuals on the list that they compile, while the purpose of the list formed by DHS is not expressly laid out. The order also threatens that the government will withhold federal funding from states that do not comply
This executive order is extremely demanding of both the states and the USPS, an organization already experiencing funding cuts and reduced support. It requires a massive amount of labor from the states in compiling the voter list for the USPS, and it requires the USPS to devise and supply envelopes with specific bar codes or other identifiers for each voter. This measure undoubtedly raises the cost of balloting and conducting elections, and it adds immediate confusion to the requirements around voting in the upcoming midterm elections. The executive order also includes an optional request for states to notify the USPS no fewer than 90 days before an election of the states’ intent to utilize mail-in and absentee ballots. This measure is especially confusing, we are already fewer than 90 days from the midterms and it is yet unclear whether the executive order will stand. Finally, this executive order, being so new and being a massive undertaking, does not devise a system for keeping data constantly updated. In a country of nearly 350 million people, voter logs are changing daily, and it’s hard to imagine that the USPS will be able to keep up with these new rigorous standards, at least in their first few years of implementation. It’s easy to imagine a scenario where the national citizenship database is reliant on outdated data and will prevent Americans from voting by mail.
The executive order itself is unconstitutional on two fronts. Firstly, the executive branch does not have the constitutional powers to govern elections. That power belongs to Congress and the states. Secondly, only Congress has authority over the USPS and the delivery of mail in the U.S., so the President does not have the power to order USPS to institute new mail-in ballot measures. Subsequently, since this executive order was released in March, it’s been the subject of a long saga of stays and appeals, from lower courts all the way to the Supreme Court. Multiple federal judges have issued injunctions preventing the USPS from imposing the new required measures. The Supreme Court issued a ruling that decided “applying the rule in the 2026 elections would be arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections." The Court did hint that the executive order might be permissible if implemented with more time before elections were to take place, so the legal battle over this executive order is likely to continue after the 2026 midterms. Meanwhile, though, the Trump Administration continues to appeal and push for this executive order to be implemented, even while mail-in voting has already begun in some states like Alabama.
Due to the Supreme Court’s ruling, it appears that the mail-in and absentee voting procedures are safe for now. Voting in the 2026 midterms will be conducted as usual, without the Trump Administration's clumsy attempts at voter suppression. States are delivering ballots to voters assuring them that the ballots will be accepted, though many election officials worry that there’s still enough time for last-minute changes to the methodology. Even if no further action is pushed through by the Trump Administration, after months of back-and-forth, voters are already confused about who is allowed to vote by mail and when. This is voter suppression in action. When election processes seem fickle and subject to change on the whim of politicians, citizens lose faith in the system. Trump’s war on mail-in voting puts everyone at risk by undermining our electoral process.
