Election workers sort ballots at the Contra Costa County election center on May 27, 2026 in Martinez, California. (Photo: Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images)
As election officials across the country prepare for the midterm elections in less than five months, President Donald Trump’s executive order limiting mail-in voting threatens to derail their preparations.
The executive order instructs the U.S. Postal Service to refuse to deliver ballots in states that do not provide voter rolls or meet other requirements. This has created a sense of deep uncertainty and concern among election officials as they consider how to comply, according to a review of court documents and interviews with election officials and election administration experts.
March 31st executive orderand proposal Regulations of the Polish Post published on June 2, which would implement the order’s requirements, pose significant logistical and procedural challenges for those running in the elections, they say. Rural areas with restricted resources are particularly at risk, but jurisdictions of all sizes may be forced to flee.
The executive order is the latest step taken by Trump to assert control over state elections, along with the stalled SAVE America Act, which would have required voters to provide documents proving their citizenship. The Justice Department, controlled by Trump, is also trying to obtain state voter rolls.
“This is yet another death by a thousand cuts that officials have suffered since the 2020 election.” said Barb Byrum, a Democratic Party official in Ingham County, Michigan, which includes Lansing.
The first ever nationwide voter list
Order and rule require states to ensure it lists of postal voters if they want the post office to deliver ballots, marking the first time the federal government has created a nationwide voter roll.
Mail-in ballot envelopes must meet certain design standards. Federal agencies must compile lists of voting-age citizens and make them available to each state to root out non-citizen voters.
But Democratic states and voting rights groups argue that the executive order – and its accompanying proposed rule – represent illegal border crossing by Trump because states administer elections under the U.S. Constitution. Trump and his Republican allies say the restrictions are necessary for election security and to combat noncitizen voting, which is extremely scarce.
The Postal Service did not respond to questions from States Newsroom. The agency said the rule would “facilitate the faithful enforcement of federal law.”
Multiple lawsuits were filed against the order, but in May a federal judge in Washington, D.C rejected to stop it, in part because the Trump administration has not taken enough action to implement its requirements. Another federal judge in Massachusetts is considering a separate motion to block the order.
With the executive order still in effect, at least for now, election officials and the experts working with them are taking its implications and proposed rules for the Postal Service seriously.
“We do not have a national voter registration list. We do not currently have a list of sanctioned, eligible absentee voters at the federal level,” said Tammy Patrick, director of programs at the Election Center, run by the National Association of Election Officials. “This is a big, big change in the way elections have always been conducted.”
The sweep changes very quickly
In court documents submitted in Maylocal elections officials and local governments representing 26 jurisdictions across the country warned that the executive order would “severely disrupt” local election administration and force the implementation of sweeping changes within months. They argued that implementing the regulation’s requirements would largely fall on local election officials.
Byrum was one of the officials who signed on to the memorandum, along with other officials from Boston and counties in Pennsylvania, Washington, Wisconsin and elsewhere.
Under the regulation, states that want to mail ballots must provide the Postal Service with lists of voters who intend to deliver absentee ballots. Local election officials will play a immense role in helping states compile these lists and will have primary responsibility for helping voters correct any errors, according to court documents.
Trump wants everything ready by November. The schedules proposed in the executive order “present a logistical nightmare for local election officials,” officials warn.
“The general rule is don’t make changes before a big election because there’s always something you haven’t thought about,” said Carolina Lopez, executive director of the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions, a nonpartisan organization of election officials in jurisdictions with at least 250,000 people.
The proposed Postal Service rule calls for the agency to launch a portal where states will upload voter lists and make updates. But many questions remain open, said Lopez, who previously managed elections in Miami-Dade County, Florida, for a decade.
The portal poses a potential bottleneck in the electoral system, and it is unclear what would happen if it were ever offline. The United States has a decentralized electoral system in which each state conducts its own elections. In turn, the Postal Service’s portal would create a single point of failure, raising information security concerns for tens of millions of voters.
Additionally, although every state maintains a voter registration list, there is no nationwide standard for formatting this data. It’s unclear whether the portal will accept data in different formats – the proposed rule only states that the Postal Service will not alter data submitted by states.
“It’s a little bit different across the country, so normalizing the data will be a process,” Lopez said.
Fighting for tiny, rural counties
Department of Justice he initially said in a court document that the Department of Homeland Security had previously planned to obtain voter data from the Postal Service regression a few days later. Still, the Justice Department continues to engage in “preliminary discussions” about data sharing, the Justice Department said in a subsequent lawsuit.
DHS operates the Systematic Alien Eligibility Verification (SAVE) system, which can scan voter records to identify potential foreign nationals. The Department of Justice has sued 30 states in an attempt to force them to turn over unredacted voter rolls, which contain sensitive personal information such as birth dates, driver’s licenses and full or partial Social Security numbers, to submit information through SAVE.
The proposed Postal Service regulations also impose standards for ballot envelopes that states must meet if they want to mail ballots.
Envelopes must include the election mail logo, be compatible with automation and have a barcode for tracking. They are already considered best practices and many jurisdictions across the country already operate them, but the rule would make them mandatory.
Election offices in tiny, rural counties may have difficulty following these rules. Patrick said that in many places, elections are handled by one person who may not even work full-time.
“There are rural offices all over the country, some of them don’t have their own computer in the office – they share it with the tax official or whatever – they don’t have the ability to generate serialized tracking codes, or smart postal barcodes,” Patrick said. “Because they physically handwrite these envelopes or use an address stamp.”
Neither the executive order nor the proposed Postal Service rules include federal funding for implementation, which would likely have to be appropriated by Congress.
Some Republican states favored the executive order. A dozen GOP state attorneys general filed court documents defending the ordinance and arguing that it will “increase the security of mail-in voting.”
“It is essential to the strength of our republic that we ensure that only American citizens vote in our elections and that mail-in and absentee ballots are secure and reliable,” South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson said in a statement earlier this spring.
But Matt Crane, a Republican who is executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, said the executive order and proposed regulations amount to an overreach of the federal government on responsibilities best left to states and local governments.
The biggest reaction among Colorado officials, he said, was “why?”
“No offense to our friends at the post office,” Crane said, “but I trust our processes more than theirs.”
