Days before the election of 1864, Pvt. Isaac Walters watched a group of soldiers leave a Union hospital in Virginia. They had been granted furloughs to travel hundreds of miles home to vote.
Walters wished he could join them. “They will all get to vote for President I Suppose,” he wrote his sister-in-law, in a letter preserved at the National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C.
More than 160 years later, voting from afar is again at the center of a fight over American democracy. The Supreme Court on Monday blocked the Trump administration’s plan to use the Postal Service to screen mail ballots, the latest chapter in the long and sometimes contentious relationship between the nation’s postal system and its elections.
The postal system was created in part to bring together and inform citizens of a sprawling republic. It later helped Americans away from home cast their ballots, weathered a transformation in its funding and a collapse in traditional mail, and became a political flashpoint when voting by mail peaked during the coronavirus pandemic.
The postal system was born in revolution.
Before the American Revolution, colonists built an alternative to the British mail system that connected groups and allowed them to communicate beyond the reach of Crown postmasters, according to the National Postal Museum. In 1775, the Continental Congress adopted the idea and named Benjamin Franklin the first postmaster general.
The Post Office Act of 1792 reflected the founders’ belief that the mail system could help sustain the new republic. George Washington championed a broad postal network to spread knowledge of the government’s laws and proceedings. James Madison warned against high postage rates that would inhibit the “distribution of knowledge and information throughout the Union.”
Congress made newspapers especially cheap to mail, helping to support an informed electorate. The law also protected the privacy of correspondence and gave Congress control over new postal routes.
Postal Service records show that the network grew with the country, from 75 post offices in 1790 to more than 28,000 by 1860. The idea of using it to facilitate voting away from home was emerging: Pennsylvania allowed soldiers to cast absentee ballots from the field during the War of 1812, and New Jersey passed similar legislation in 1815.
The Civil War changed how Americans voted.
Absentee voting was not entirely new, but it became widespread during the Civil War and turned into a partisan issue.
As President Abraham Lincoln sought re-election in 1864, hundreds of thousands of voters were on battlefields far from home. Nineteen Union states allowed troops to vote away from their usual polling places via field polling places, proxies and mail, according to the Library of Congress.
The changes prompted accusations of fraud and intimidation, including absentee ballot-stuffing and Lincoln administration officials pressuring soldiers, according to Jonathan W. White, a Civil War historian.
The balloting processes varied. In Ohio, soldiers voted in camps and hospitals, and election officials mailed the tallies home in specially printed envelopes. Other states used the mail to carry ballots or proxy votes.
The Civil War established an enduring precedent: Americans unable to reach the polls did not have to forfeit their votes. Absentee voting gradually expanded beyond the military, and later wars also prompted the government to find ways to accommodate millions of Americans far from home.
A struggling Postal Service became an election battleground during the pandemic.
After a major strike by federal postal workers in 1970, Congress replaced the cabinet-level Post Office Department with the largely self-financing United States Postal Service.
Decades later, the internet eroded its traditional business. Postal Service data show that total mail volume peaked at 213 billion pieces in 2006, and the Government Accountability Office found that it fell by about 20 percent in just four years. By 2020, first-class mail volume was roughly half its peak from two decades earlier.
During the coronavirus pandemic, states passed new laws making it easier to vote by mail for the 2020 election to protect public health. Nearly 70 million Americans turned to mail ballots for the 2020 election, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, even as the newly appointed postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, imposed operational changes and cost-cutting measures that slowed some mail delivery.
At the same time, President Trump amplified unfounded claims of widespread fraud in mail voting, while Democrats accused his administration of trying to suppress votes. The Postal Service became a focus of congressional hearings, lawsuits and the broader fight over voting.
Trump tries to make the Postal Service a gatekeeper.
Mr. Trump returned to office last year still falsely claiming that the 2020 election that he lost had been rigged. He continued to attack mail voting, calling it “mail-in-cheating,” despite casting his own ballot by mail in a special election in Florida in March 2026. It was not the first time he had voted by mail.
Later that month, Mr. Trump signed an executive order giving the Postal Service new authority to screen mail ballots by requiring states to share lists of voters ahead of time. Election officials warned that the system could disenfranchise voters and cause chaos.
On Monday, the Supreme Court blocked the administration’s ballot-screening plan, which had been challenged by two dozen states and multiple voting rights groups.
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