President Trump’s attack on mail-in voting is roping in the U.S. Postal Service.
Under a new proposal introduced on Friday, the USPS would force states to hand over the names and addresses of residents who vote by mail. States would also be required to provide the agency with names and barcodes linked to mail-in ballots for federal elections.
The proposal is the latest development in the president’s crusade against mail-in voting, in which states proactively send out ballots to all eligible voters. Trump has vowed to “lead a movement to get rid of mail-in ballots,” which he has falsely linked to debunked claims of voter fraud during the 2020 election. Mail-in voting is widely praised as an accessible, secure way to encourage voter turnout, but the practice has found itself in the crosshairs during both of Trump’s terms in office.
“Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating. I call it mail-in cheating, and we got to do something about it all,” Trump said earlier this year.
In late March, Trump signed an executive order that would require the Department of Homeland Security to create a list of verified American citizens eligible to vote. The federal agency would provide the list to states and order state attorneys general to investigate and prosecute “election officials, individuals, and other entities that violate the law” by giving federal ballots to ineligible voters. On Thursday, a federal judge declined to block Trump’s new restrictions on mail-in voting.
The executive order seeks to wrest some power away from state election authorities, deputizing the USPS to send out ballots and track them using a new federal envelope and barcode system. Trump clearly wants the federal government to go hands-on with the election process, but the Constitution grants states the authority to run elections.
“States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” Trump claimed in a Truth Social post last year. “They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”
In spite of the condemnation, Trump mailed in his own ballot during a recent Florida special election.
While the president has claimed that the “cheating on mail-in voting is legendary,” fraud with mail-in ballots is actually extremely rare. A recent analysis by the Brookings Institution showed that mail-in voting fraud affects only four of every 10 million mail-in votes. In Oregon, which implemented its universal vote-by-mail system more than two decades ago, only a dozen cases of confirmed fraud were documented between 2000 and 2020.
Universal vote-by-mail is much more common in Western states that reliably elect Democrats, including California, Oregon, and Washington. Colorado, Nevada, Utah, Vermont, and Washington, D.C., also use a mail-in voting system, automatically sending all eligible voters in the state a ballot through the mail.
