The Trump administration’s plans to impose new requirements on the handling of election mail are facing resistance from election officials, who say there is simply not enough time to implement the changes before the November midterm elections.
Election officials and mail voting experts told CNN in court filings and interviews that complying with the US Postal Service’s proposed rules would be extremely difficult, even if states were able to find the millions of dollars needed to meet the requirements.
The administration has described the changes as “modest”, but election officials warn that failure to comply could result in the Postal Service refusing to deliver ballots, potentially affecting millions of voters.
One of the major challenges involves redesigning and printing election envelopes. Vendors have told election officials that there is insufficient time to produce the millions of new envelopes that would be required. Court filings also raise concerns about whether enough paper would be available because of continuing supply constraints.
“We’re weeks away from ballots going out, and USPS still can’t answer basic questions about how this is going to work. Clearly they don’t even know,” Amanda Gonzalez, clerk of Jefferson County, Colorado, told CNN. The county is expected to send approximately 433,000 mail ballots.
“These aren’t minor implementation details – they determine whether millions of eligible voters get their ballots,” Gonzalez said. “At this point, even when we prevail and it’s not implemented, the uncertainty being created by all of this is itself an election risk.”
Election officials have therefore concentrated on reassuring voters that the November election will proceed and that they will retain access to voting by mail and other methods, rather than focusing solely on the potential consequences of the rules.
Additional concerns emerged Tuesday following the release of a whistleblower report about the Postal Service. The report alleged that the agency had allocated only a few days to test a newly developed system designed to receive voter information required under the plan.
The whistleblower also raised concerns about the system’s ability to handle errors. Under the Postal Service’s proposed approach, an entire batch of ballots could reportedly be rejected if one envelope failed to match the voter information uploaded to the system. Election officials warned that this could affect tens of thousands of voters in some jurisdictions.
The proposed requirements are currently blocked by a temporary federal court order, which the Trump administration is appealing. The dispute has already reached the Supreme Court, which previously allowed the administration to proceed with developing a final version of the rules. The final plan is expected to return to the justices.
Tammy Patrick, chief programmes officer for the National Association of Election Officials, said many election officials were focused on primary elections and preparations for the midterms when Trump issued his executive order in March.
“Most election officials – when they saw the Executive Order in March – they had their heads down conducting their primaries, getting ready for the midterms,” Patrick said. When the final USPS plan was released last month, “many of them were shocked when they heard what was in the rule.”
The White House rejected the concerns, arguing that election officials had enough time to prepare because the proposal had been introduced months earlier.
“Any confusion was caused by radical Democrats’ litigation to stop these commonsense measures that protect the security of mail-in ballots and ensure only Americans are electing American leaders,” White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis said.
The Postal Service said it was examining the concerns raised by the whistleblower.
“The United States Postal Service has spent months developing a U.S. Federal Ballot Mail Portal to provide election officials with a simple, secure, and efficient way to share lists of individuals receiving ballots by mail in their respective states. This work has at all times been conducted in a manner consistent with court orders,” a spokesperson said.
“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 added.
Under the proposed rules, both the envelope used to send a ballot to a voter and the envelope used to return it to election officials would need a unique barcode for automated tracking.
While many jurisdictions with high levels of mail voting already use barcodes on outgoing envelopes, they are less common on return envelopes. In some rural areas, neither type of envelope currently carries the required barcode.
Pennsylvania court filings indicate that more than a dozen counties in the state could be affected by the requirement.
The cost of replacing envelopes could also be high. Washington Elections Director Stuart Holmes said complying with the requirement would cost the state nearly $2m because more than 1 million envelopes would have to be replaced in counties where return envelopes do not have the required unique barcodes.
Holmes said he contacted the three major vendors used by Washington for mail ballots, but none could confirm that they would be able to produce replacement envelopes before the election.
“It’s just not possible for us to meet the USPS requirement,” Holmes told CNN.
Oregon election officials warned that a nationwide rush to reprint envelopes could put additional pressure on suppliers and printing companies.
“(Vendors) do not have a stockpile of paper, and post-pandemic paper supply shortages mean that paper suppliers may not be able to timely supply our vendors with the paper they need,” Oregon Elections Director Dena Dawson said in a court filing.
The redesigned envelopes would also have to be reviewed by USPS analysts before printing. Election officials questioned whether the agency has enough staff to process what could be thousands of requests.
The Postal Service has around 40 Mailpiece Design Analysts, known as MDAs, while the new regulation says the agency does not anticipate needing additional staff.
Michigan alone has 1,521 different envelope types, with at least some requiring redesigns because they lack the required barcode, according to a declaration from the state’s elections director.
USPS estimates that its analysts can approve a design in an average of two days, but officials said their previous experiences suggest the process can take considerably longer.
“For Vermont, with 494 different ballot styles and corresponding ballot envelope styles, the approval of our ballot envelope styles took approximately 3 months,” Vermont Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas said in a court filing. “After all of that work, the USPS has requested changes for 247 envelope styles.”
The second major requirement would require election offices to upload lists of voters who are due to receive mail ballots through a new USPS portal.
Election officials would have to regularly update the information because some states allow voters to register and request mail ballots only weeks or even days before an election.
The portal has not previously been used for this purpose, raising concerns over its reliability and how the upload process will work. Officials also pointed to the potential for errors when using Excel, as numbers beginning with zero can automatically have those digits removed.
Colorado’s secretary of state estimates that implementing the data requirements could create “tens of thousands of hours” of additional work for election staff across the state.
Part of the problem is that Colorado’s voter registration database does not currently contain the barcode information assigned to individual envelopes, meaning officials could have to enter the data manually.
The Postal Service has also placed responsibility on state election officials to determine which local and state employees should receive access to the portal and undergo training, potentially involving dozens or hundreds of workers in some states.
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes raised another concern over whether the portal could cope with a large upload from Maricopa County, which has more than 2.5 million voters.
Fontes said a separate federal system used by the county to verify citizenship information had previously required uploads to be scheduled when no other jurisdiction was using it because of concerns the system could crash.
Election officials have warned that the new rules could create confusion among voters and election administrators while the legal battle continues.
“Confusion is, in some instances, I think the goal,” Patrick said.
