Jeff Danziger lives in New York City and Vermont. He is a long time cartoonist for The Rutland Herald and is represented by Counterpoint Syndicate. He is a recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons, a novel and a memoir. Visit him at jeffdanziger.com.
Top U.S. Postal Service officials tasked with issuing new regulations on mail voting expressed concerns in internal meetings about how the rules they were drafting could delay or block ballots from reaching large swaths of eligible voters for the upcoming midterms, but the rules moved forward anyway, ProPublica has learned.
The revelations about the discussions, from someone familiar with the rulemaking process, come as a separate anonymous federal employee filed a whistleblower disclosure with Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), warning that the new system is untested and error-prone, and could lead to mass disenfranchisement in the upcoming election. The whistleblower described the entire process as “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed.”
In a March executive order, President Donald Trump directed the Postal Service to create the new rules, including requiring states to give USPS a list of all voters eligible to receive a ballot in the mail and requiring USPS to use those lists to determine which ballots get sent to voters. USPS officials were tasked with crafting the details of how the new system would work, including the creation of a new portal for states to upload their voters’ information and the back-end software that would allow mail delivery sites and local post offices to track, and potentially block, ballots entering into the mail on their way to voters.
Voting rights organizations, state officials and Democratic political groups filed lawsuits challenging the new rules, and a federal court has temporarily blocked the requirements for states. The merits of the new rule are expected to reach the Supreme Court before the November election. Even if the Supreme Court allows the plan, though, election officials and experts say that the new system could not be ready in time for this election, given that ballots for people who are in the military or overseas must be sent out this month.
During meetings in which top USPS officials discussed how to comply with the executive order, there was much discussion about the controversial nature of what they needed to do, according to the person familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. The focus was on limiting the impact to voters while also complying. One repeated concern regarded how to avoid invalidating an entire batch of ballots if one voter among thousands couldn’t be confirmed as eligible. Some in the meetings recommended trying to limit harm to voters by not rejecting the entire batch, according to the person familiar with the discussions.
Despite that, according to the whistleblower who contacted Blumenthal, the directive to reject entire batches if they included just one unverified ballot moved forward.
“As presently designed, if even one bar code on one single ballot in a bulk-mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to properly scan during the verification process, the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the state — effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed to voters,” the whistleblower wrote.
Election clerks raised similar concerns directly to USPS officials just days before the final rule was issued, at a mid-August National Association of Election Officials conference in Kansas City, Missouri, ProPublica has learned.
There, an example was given of Maricopa County, Arizona, which often sends out more than 2 million ballots at a time in its initial mailing. USPS officials confirmed it was possible that one ballot with a bad barcode or wrong voter information within the more than 2 million ballots could delay the entire mailing, according to two people who attended the related committee meeting.
The Postal Service has defended its final rule in court, stating that it does not intend to seize control of administration of elections and that the rule “need not and should not prevent a single voter from voting by mail.”
In a statement to ProPublica, a Postal Service spokesperson said the agency is carefully reviewing the Blumenthal whistleblower’s concerns and that USPS has spent months developing its system, in a manner consistent with court orders, and will soon provide instructions for how election officials can use it.
“Regardless of political party or perspective, we share a common goal: ensuring that Americans can have confidence that their election mail will be handled securely and delivered reliably,” the spokesperson said.
Lauren Bis, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement to ProPublica that the process of building software to carry out the new mail ballot checks “is neither complex nor unique for USPS since the Postal Service regularly uses bulk mailing and intelligent mail barcodes for a wide variety of large customers.”
“Under President Trump, the federal government is working to ensure safe, transparent, and honest elections,” Bis wrote.
Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat who received the whistleblower disclosure, asked the postmaster general for detailed info about the plan in a letter this week. He told reporters on a call Monday that the new USPS rule puts all mail voters at risk, and he accused the administration of being “hellbent on changing the framework of casting ballots in this country, clearly for political reasons.”
Election officials and printing experts have told ProPublica that errors in the system are likely, given how difficult it is to design envelopes with a clear barcode for scanning and to keep voter information up to date. Seemingly small details have yet to be worked out that could throw the entire system into chaos, they said, such as what file format to use when uploading voter lists and whether to provide mailing or residential addresses to USPS.
“These are trivial things that create massive problems,” said Jeff Ellington, CEO of Runbeck Election Services, which prints ballots and ballot envelopes for counties. Beyond that, he said, most of the counties in the country don’t have the type of barcodes needed to make the system function. And the Postal Service hasn’t told local election officials how to design new ballot envelopes and get them approved by USPS in this short of a timeframe.
The Blumenthal whistleblower said the idea that entire batches will be delayed by one mistake is especially concerning because of significant operational problems that exist with the portal that will contain information about eligible voters and the lack of testing of the system. The whistleblower is concerned about how, while systems typically have a known error rate, there has been no internal acknowledgment that errors will occur in the new mail ballot system, and instead the USPS has adopted a “zero-percent failure policy.”
The whistleblower also alleges that the administration moved forward with steps to create the new system during two initial injunctions from the court, which would have violated the court’s order. USPS had stated when issuing its final rule that it was adhering to the injunctions and would not take actions to implement the rule for the 2026 election unless the injunctions were lifted.
Both the whistleblower and the person familiar with discussions about the executive order’s implementation said that the timeline for creating a sophisticated tracking system would typically be at least nine months. The whistleblower’s disclosure says that workers began to work on the system in mid-June and had only weeks before being given a Sept. 1 deadline. The person familiar with the discussions said it was common for priority projects within USPS to have crunched timelines. The internal goal, the person said, was to try to implement the new system by that deadline or to show why it couldn’t happen — which was typical of other directives the agency had faced in the past.
The whistleblower disclosure described confusion as the staff attempted to develop the systems without enough direction, within weeks, and without proper communication, and said several employees referred to the situation as a “shit show.”
Reprinted with permission from Pro Publica
Last Monday, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court, by emergency application, to lift a lower-court order blocking its executive order on mail-in voting—clearing the way for it to operate in November.
The request has the elements of a potential perfect storm: a likely unconstitutional executive order on mail-in voting, brought up on an emergency appeal, to this Supreme Court.
In an inexhaustible effort to secure unfair advantage in advance of the election, the administration has been throwing everything against the wall. Not much has stuck.
And through all of it, win or lose, it had never once asked the Supreme Court, its preferred port in a storm, to review any of these efforts. When courts struck them down, again and again, the Solicitor General stayed home. Monday’s application broke that pattern—the first time the administration has taken one of its voting orders to the Court.
Take just its parallel campaign to bully states into handing over their voter rolls: there, it has gone to district court eighteen times and lost every single one—a record of 0 and 18, the latest defeat coming Wednesday, when Judge Zahid Quraishi dismissed the suit against New Jersey.
The mail-voting suit now before the Court is a separate front. It was brought by 23 states and the District of Columbia, most of them Democratic-led. On Wednesday, a dozen red states that had intervened to defend the order filed a related application of their own to the High Court.
The battle will play out in short order.
The presidential order in play, Executive Order 14399, signed March 31, directs the Department of Homeland Security to compile state-by-state lists of citizens deemed eligible to vote, and directs the Postal Service to refuse to send a mail-in ballot to any voter whose name does not appear on the list.
Many commentators have explained why such a maneuver—which Trump tries to justify on the tired canard of widespread voting by non-citizens—would be revolutionary and cataclysmic. There never has been a federal citizenship roster, much less one assembled and policed by the executive branch, and all indications are that the upshot would be the disenfranchisement of millions of eligible voters, and of course, disproportionately Democratic.
The lower courts have invalidated the order on multiple grounds, most importantly as a violation of the separation of powers. The Constitution accords the primary role in running elections to the States, who decide who is eligible and the “Times, Places, and Manner” of voting; Congress has a limited, secondary role, the power to “make or alter” those rules by statute. The president has no role whatsoever. That is the brick wall that the Executive Order, and other Trumpian efforts, continually run into.
The same principle drives the administration’s losing streak in the voter-roll fight. Every one of those defeats turned on the same defect—the Trump administration’s reaching for a power the Constitution never gave it. The mail-voting order is that same defect, with a stamp on it.
And here is the critical point: in its emergency application, the government has not tried to defend the order’s legality. It is mounting a narrow procedural argument.
As always, the “emergency” shadow docket appeal asks the Supreme Court not for a final ruling on the merits, but for a provisional decision vacating Judge Talwani’s injunction. So we’re in the by-now-familiar territory of the four-part test to vacate and stay, a domain in which the Court’s performance has been, to say the least, inconsistent.
The first and most important factor is likelihood of success on the merits: is the government likely to win the case?
The distinctive point here is that the administration is not even trying to argue that it is likely to succeed because Trump in fact does have the power that court after court has denied him.
The administration’s argument for likelihood of success—its only such argument—is that the case is not ripe. The states sued too soon, the argument runs, before any agency “finalized” a rule or a list, so there is no concrete injury and nothing to enjoin. The Solicitor General avers that, as of now, Trump’s order is a mere “intra-Branch directive,” something the agencies are still “deliberating over how (if at all) to implement.” Nothing has happened yet. Come back later.
Both courts below rejected that story, and on a summary-judgment record the government did not dispute. They found the states already injured, in three distinct ways. First, the states must divert staff and money now to plan for the order’s demands. Connecticut, for one, has pulled election officials off legally required work to build a compliance plan. Second, they face certain and imminent pocketbook harm: several states have already bought mail-ballot envelopes the coming Postal Service rule would render useless, with Massachusetts alone out roughly $3 million. Third, and most ominous, the order threatens the states’ own officials with criminal prosecution for issuing ballots to eligible voters who happen to be missing from a federal list the government concedes will be incomplete. Those injuries are happening now, on the calendar the election runs on, not the one the litigation runs on.
The administration’s “premature” pitch subsumes a genuinely sly and sinister scenario. Were it to prevail, the administration would be freed up to implement the order, only to suddenly spring it on the states in, say, October. At that point, with ballots going out and little runway left for litigation, the machinery comes down: the lists go to the states, the Postal Service starts refusing to mail ballots to voters whose names don’t appear on them, and a criminal-referral threat hangs over any election official who sends one anyway. The states can fight back, but it’s an uphill battle to a stay with the clock running out before the midterms.
It would be an October ambush, if not quite an October surprise. The Court endorses the administration’s current view that the suit is premature, and by the time it isn’t premature, it’s quite late—perhaps too late to restore order and lawfulness. And as we well know, Trump’s hole card in election chicanery has always been chaos.
There is a more sanguine view, and the sharpest chronicler of the shadow docket, Steve Vladeck, has laid it out.
Professor Vladeck emphasizes that the administration has not asked the Court to bless the order on the merits. So even a ruling in its favor would not settle the president’s authority over mail-in voting. It would only put off the merits, perhaps by a matter of weeks.
And he presses the same pressure point from the other side. Either the administration takes meaningful steps to implement before the election, in which case the standing and ripeness problems it is hiding behind necessarily go away and the challengers can come back to court on a ripe record; or it doesn’t, in which case we needn’t fear the consequences of the order. Heads the states have a case; tails the government has no emergency.
I lean the other way, toward worry. The administration filed this application now—on an emergency basis—for the first time, after two years of losing these election-regulation fights. The Solicitor General did not break a two-year pattern of staying home and rolling the dice on the ripeness issue to win a mere procedural delay in a merits fight. He must be calculating that the emergency application buys something—some more favorable angle in the administration’s paramount goal of tilting the election.
The Trump administration’s application talks out of both sides of its mouth, and not subtly. Its sole argument on the primary factor of likelihood of success is that the case is premature—nothing has yet happened to injure the plaintiffs. It’s too early.
But on the next factor, irreparable harm—why they need the stay right now—the position is that it’s getting too late. Time is short. Implementation “will need to begin well before November—indeed, as soon as early to mid-August.” Every day of delay makes it harder to get the machinery running before the election; unless the Court acts immediately, the harm will be “effectively unreviewable.”
So: too early for the states to sue, and too late for the government to wait. Not ripe enough to be a real case, but so urgent it can’t survive an ordinary appeal.
And the irreparable-harm claim collapses on its own terms, because of how narrow the injunction is. It stops the administration nowhere but in the 23 plaintiff states and Washington DC, and for no election but this one. The government stays free to build its lists and its Postal Service rule in 38 other states, and everywhere for the elections to come. Asked what irreparable harm all that residual freedom leaves it suffering, the government offered the First Circuit only that running a two-tiered mail system would be “confusing”—a claim the panel found entirely conclusory.
There is, by contrast, nothing conjectural about the harm to the states, which brings us back to the criminal threat. The government’s own lawyer, asked in district court whether he’d have probable cause to prosecute an official for mailing a ballot to someone the federal list omitted, answered, “I don’t know the answer to that question, Your Honor.” That is not a mere conjectural harm. It’s a gun on the table.
Monday’s filing was the 35th emergency application of the second Trump administration—more than four times as many as the Bush and Obama administrations combined filed over sixteen years. It has treated the emergency docket as its express lane, filing application after application to a Court that has granted relief in case after case, often provisionally, often without explanation, always fast.
It’s a bad way to make important constitutional law. Speaking last year to the Ninth Circuit’s lawyers and judges, Justice Kagan advised the Court to “be cautious about acting on the emergency docket”—where cases arrive “without full briefing or a robust lower court record,” and where the justices “sometimes rule . . . without explaining their reasoning.” Last Thursday, to the same conference, she allowed things had improved “by a fair bit,” but conceded the Court was still “granting too many of these applications,” creating a “kind of momentum” that only invites more.
The administration is not seeking an emergency ruling that its order is lawful. If and when it does, the odds are long: the courts have overwhelmingly rejected its attempts to muscle in on the authority of the states and Congress, and this Supreme Court’s recent election decisions give it little to build on.
The danger is subtler than that, and worse. It is the chain of events in which the Court accepts the “premature” story and vacates the injunction; the administration then fully readies the order and deploys it when the states are relatively flat-footed, and the calendar is greatly compressed.
And it would be of a piece with this administration’s brazen maneuvers to game the midterms: each depends on a combustible mix of law, politics, and the opportunistic exploitation of chaos—and chaos, as we have learned, is Trump’s stock in trade for end runs around the Constitution. As Trump told his own Justice Department in the last days of 2020, “just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen,.”
That’s our lookout as this emergency application plays out. What looks at first glance like a technical squabble over ripeness may wind up landing a far heavier practical blow. If the Court buys the “premature” story and the order comes online when it’s too late to stop, this dry procedural footnote is what the histories will circle: the day “too soon” became too late, and a technicality became a prelude to a stolen election.
Harry Litman is a former United States Attorney and the executive producer and host of the Talking Feds podcast. He has taught law at UCLA, Berkeley, and Georgetown and served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Clinton Administration. Please consider subscribing to Talking Feds on Substack.
Reprinted with permission from Talking Feds.
President Donald Trump is reportedly “livid” at a Supreme Court judge he appointed for not siding with him in his desire to force states to not count mail-in ballots when they arrive after Election Day.
“He is completely livid over the mail-in ballot ruling,” CNN senior White House correspondent Kristen Holmes said on Monday. “And of course, part of this is about the justices who decided to rule against him in this case. Just a reminder — this was the Republican National Committee challenging a Mississippi law that allowed mail-in ballots that came in after Election Day to still be counted.”
She added that “if you look at the justices who voted against Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee, one of them sticks out in particular, and that is Amy Coney Barrett — whom President Trump himself appointed to the bench. Trump has been growing increasingly frustrated. We've reported multiple times that behind closed doors he has slammed Amy Coney Barrett, saying that she has not stepped up and has not done basically what he put her in place to do.”
Trump has particularly focused on reducing the influence of mail-in ballots and on passing the SAVE America Act because, as he has admitted, he hopes to disenfranchise enough Democratic voters that Republicans can retain control of the House of Representatives and Senate.
“We have heard from senators up and down that they just don't have the votes to get it through, that there aren't enough Republicans who support it,” Holmes said. “And now we're hearing that the White House as well as Speaker Johnson are putting a lot of pressure on members, working the phones, to try to get this through whatever way they possibly can. You heard President Trump saying this is now more important than ever.”
She added, “And I will tell you, Erin — I'm told by a White House official that President Trump is unlikely to sign that bipartisan housing bill. He'll just let it go into law. He's not going to veto it, but right now he views actually signing it as a betrayal to his base. He has promised to get the Save America Act through before he signs any major legislation, so he's willing to potentially not sign this very widely supported housing bill in order to try to push the Save America Act forward.”
Speaker to AlterNet earlier this month Dan Vicuña, the senior policy director for voting and fair representation at the good government nonprofit Common Cause, accused Trump of attempting to suppress mail-in voting, demand stricter voter ID laws, obtain access to voter rules to conduct mass purges and threaten to install ICE at polling places in order to rig the 2026 midterm elections in his favor.
“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Vicuña told AlterNet. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”
Vicuña added that Trump’s attempts to national elections could also be illegal.
“I think some of these attempts to federalize, to nationalize elections are clearly illegal,” Vicuña said. “You've seen some of that overreach already struck down — attempts to order independent agencies to force a strict voter ID requirement on people. That has been rejected. Common Cause is in court challenging the latest executive order to turn the United States Postal Service into some election administration agency and to create a further bureaucratic layer to make it more difficult to vote by mail. In terms of the president's authority to order around USPS, it's illegal. In terms of USPS's authority to become some sort of national election administration agency, it far exceeds the legal authority that Congress gave to the postal service. The statute describing what kind of work the postal service would do is about postal service work — processing mail and selling stamps. It has nothing to do with election administration.”
Republican lawmakers have reportedly complained that Trump has given them an “impossible task” by demanding that they pass the unpopular SAVE America Act. Trump has recently said that he views a popular bipartisan bill to create affordable housing as a “yawn” and that he cares about the SAVE America Act more than that.
“I do think, though, he is focused on making sure that our elections have some semblance of faith, trust and confidence, which they have been losing in this country for decades,” former White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley told MS NOW on Monday. “You'll remember around 65 percent of Republicans did not believe that Joe Biden won the election.”
When anchor Kasie Hunt pointed out that the only reason so many Republicans doubt the election is because Trump has repeatedly spread misinformation about it, Gidley tried to deflect, inspiring laughter. Gidley later claimed Trump is “not obsessed” with stopping voters, eliciting more laughter from inside the studio.
Reprinted with permission from Alternet
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