Now that the Supreme Court has blocked President Trump’s executive order restricting mail voting ahead of the midterms, election officials across the country are shelving their contingency plans and preparing for a new effort: restoring trust in mail voting.
Mr. Trump’s repeated false attacks on voting by mail, and the monthslong legal back and forth over whether he could restrict the practice through the Postal Service, have left many voters baffled.
With the legal question now settled, election officials at the state and local levels will now shift their focus to communicating to voters that they can trust that they can securely continue to vote by mail without federal restrictions.
“We’ve actually been working all weekend to figure out the different scenarios for the outcomes of the decision,” said Francisco Aguilar, a Democrat who is Nevada’s secretary of state. “And one of them was, Hey, if we are in a position where we get a favorable ruling from the courts, what are we going to do to educate voters and to build that confidence that their ballot is going to get counted?”
For Nevada, that will mean an expansive voter education program that will include television ads, digital ads and text messages to voters.
Mr. Trump has worked to sow doubts about the American electoral process for years, telling lies about election outcomes and making false claims of fraud. (Lawsuits filed by Mr. Trump and his allies challenging the results of the 2020 election were repeatedly rejected.) He often assails mail voting, despite voting by mail himself.
This year he has aggressively pushed to regulate elections, despite the fact that the Constitution leaves the administration of elections to the states. He has mobilized multiple agencies under the executive branch, exacerbating confusion and doubt among the American electorate.
The president’s continued attacks on the electoral process have thrust election officials at the state and local levels into new, more public-facing roles.
“This obviously is not the first time that Trump pushes out more lies about vote by mail,” said Jena Griswold, Colorado’s secretary of state. “Our message even during all this back and forth with this litigation is that everything was proceeding as normal.”
Ms. Griswold, a Democrat, said she was asked recently whether it was safe to return ballots by mail. “And my answer is, You can return your ballot however you want,” she said.
Ms. Griswold pointed to a program in Colorado that allows voters to track their mail ballot “as if it were an Amazon package” as a method of maintaining trust in mail voting.
This month, North Carolina became the first state to send out mail ballots for the midterms, even as the Trump administration was seeking to restrict the practice.
Since then, there has been confusion among voters there about what the legal odyssey would mean for North Carolina, a swing state that could see slim margins in several crucial races. But officials there remain resolute. Everything is “full steam ahead” in light of the ruling on Monday, according to Jason Tyson, a spokesman for the state’s Board of Elections.
“This doesn’t change anything for us,” Mr. Tyson said, noting that roughly 300,000 ballots had already been sent out for absentee voting.
In Arizona, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes was feeling relieved on Monday night that there would be no major change in the way voting by mail would occur. “We are a hotbed of election denialism, but even election denialists vote by mail,” Mr. Fontes, a Democrat, said. “I think it’s something really steeped in the culture of voting in our state.”
Mr. Fontes said that his office had already put out public service announcements on how mail voting works in Arizona, and that it had enlisted public officials in the education process. “We’ve stayed consistent in our messaging in hopes that things wouldn’t change,” he said. “And now that they’re not changing, we’re going to stay the course.”
There have been other concerns about the Postal Service and mail ballots. Over the past two years, the rate at which mail votes have been rejected for arriving late has ticked upward in at least a dozen states, further worrying election officials as the post office’s leadership continued to align with Mr. Trump’s executive order.
In Washington State, Stuart Holmes, the state director of elections, said that officials would “execute on our messaging that voting by mail is safe and secure.”
But Mr. Holmes said that he still had concerns about the reliability of the postal system. Instead of using the mail, he said, he was encouraging voters to use official ballot drop boxes. Those who do use the mail, he said, could register for a system that texts them when their ballot is received by the auditor’s office for counting.
Tobias Read, a Democrat who is Oregon’s secretary of state, projected confidence that voters in his state would trust the system despite Mr. Trump’s many suggestions that mail voting leads to fraud.
“This is another case in which the people understand something better than this president,” he said.
Eduardo Medina contributed reporting.
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