We are less than two months from Election Day and President Trump is still trying to block millions of Americans from receiving ballots in the mail.
The president’s allies at the U.S. Postal Service are seeking to implement a new rule that places a host of requirements on states that allow mail voting that would be nearly impossible for them to meet this close to an election.
The effort is part of Trump’s yearslong endeavor to restrict access to voting and cast doubts on American elections, which has not abated since he lost the 2020 presidential election and disputed the results.
The story is complicated, hard to follow and subject to change at any moment at the hands of federal judges. There are different court challenges and standard legal arguments about who has standing to sue and when they can do it. To help understand where things are, I consulted with my Times colleagues who cover voting, the Supreme Court, the Postal Service and the legal cases: Nick Corasaniti, Abbie VanSickle, Zach Montague and Eileen Sullivan.
Below are answers to five big questions about mail voting and how Trump’s proposals will affect the ballots that may or may not come to your home in the weeks ahead.
What does the Trump administration want to do with mail ballots?
Trump administration officials want to severely curtail the use of ballots sent to voters by mail.
A rule published by the Postal Service would require all states to upload lists of voters who receive mail ballots to a governmental portal. That portal is not yet online, and it is unclear if courts will block the rule or even if the portal will work.
(A previous federal government portal, former President Barack Obama’s healthcare.gov, had a far longer runway before it launched and was a catastrophic failure.)
The rule also requires any state sending ballots by mail to use a special bar code on the envelopes. Those bar codes would in many cases require the counties and municipalities that administer elections to acquire dedicated printers that they do not already have. Doing this in the weeks remaining before state laws require mail ballots to be sent would likely be an insurmountable task for thousands of local elections officials.
So will ballots go out in the mail?
Some of them are already have. There is nothing yet stopping other states from sending theirs too.
North Carolina and Delaware began mailing ballots Friday. Sixteen more states are scheduled to send ballots within the next two weeks.
We do not know yet whether the Postal Service, under the direction of Trump appointees, will continue to process ballots without delay if jurisdictions do not abide by the new rules.
What happens if the new rules on mail ballots take effect after voters have received them?
The worst-case scenario: Voters would have to return ballots in person to a drop box or a local elections office, rather than mailing them back.
Lots of voters do this already. In 2024, about 21 percent of mail ballots were returned in drop boxes or to a local clerk, according to the MIT Elections and Data Lab.
But this is not always possible. College students, workers on a long-term assignment far from home or snowbirds who split time between warm and cold weather climates would all be far from communities in which they vote.
Is there a backup plan if Trump manages to stop mail ballots?
Mail voting is so prevalent now that many states have built their entire voting infrastructure around it.
Washington State, one of a handful that mails ballots to every registered voter, no longer has traditional in-person polling places. Arizona’s secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, told me recently that his state counts on 80 percent of its voters casting ballots they receive in the mail and is not equipped for millions of people to suddenly vote in person.
Some elections officials in mail-heavy states are considering creating pop-up voting centers to handle massive numbers of people if mail balloting is disrupted.
Others may ask voters to pick up their ballots at elections offices or municipal buildings. Real discussions are taking place among some Democratic elections officials about creating a system to have voters cast ballots online.
How is all of this legal?
Several groups are trying to stop this effort in the courts. Democratic attorneys general and voting rights organizations have sued to block the Postal Service from implementing its new rules.
The Constitution grants states and Congress responsibility for elections, not the executive branch. Groups challenging the new rule argue that the Postal Service, a constitutionally mandated executive branch agency, has overstepped its bounds. The Trump administration says the agency is acting under federal law.
As of right now — Friday afternoon — a federal judge in Boston is weighing whether to keep in place a block on the Postal Service rules. Whatever she decides, the case is certain to be appealed, though the Trump administration is likely to ask the Supreme Court to rule on the case before a critical mass of states distributes mail ballots.
quote of the day
“When you’re young, you’re thinking: ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.’”
That was Gloria Steinem on “Real Time With Bill Maher” in February 2016, reflecting on why she believed Senator Bernie Sanders had outsize support from young voters, including women, during his presidential campaign.
It was, in retrospect, a weird time, 10 years and forever ago, Michael Kruse writes.
One Number
More than 46,000
That’s how many voters in North Carolina have requested absentee ballots for the general election.
On Friday, North Carolina became the first state to forge ahead with its standard vote-by-mail program as the Trump administration escalates its efforts to restrict the practice.
take our quiz
This question comes from a recent article in The Times. Click an answer to see if you’re right. (The link will be free.)
Which snack did Josh Turek, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Iowa, tuck into at the state fair as my colleague Michael Kruse interviewed him?
Taylor Robinson contributed reporting.
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