Trump Is Once Again Weaponing the Postal Service to Try to Undermine Mail Voting

The Supreme Court on Monday lifted a lower court’s injunction on President Trump’s executive order seeking to limit mail-in voting ahead of November’s midterm elections. Trump’s order directs the Department of Homeland Security to create state-by-state lists of eligible voters who are citizens. The U.S. Postal Service would then use the lists provided by states to assess whether voters should be allowed to vote by mail. Justices ruled 6 to 3 that California and 22 other states lacked standing to sue over the issue. The ruling, however, did not address whether Trump had authority to impose the rules. A separate nationwide injunction against parts of the same order remains in place.

“This leads to a lot of uncertainty going into the midterms, because the Trump executive order would radically restrict vote by mail,” says Ari Berman, the national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones. If the ruling goes into effect, “it could disenfranchise millions of voters in
November.”

“If voting proceeds based on these DHS lists,” adds Berman, “it’s going to be inaccurate, it’s going to be unconstitutional, and a lot of legitimate American voters are going to be wrongly labeled as noncitizens and unable to vote — either based on shoddy data or an intentional attempt by the Trump administration to prevent people from voting.”

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Nermeen Shaikh.

With the midterm elections less than 10 weeks away, the Supreme Court has lifted a lower court injunction on President Trump’s executive order seeking to limit mail-in voting ahead of the midterms. Trump’s order directed the Department of Homeland Security to create state-by-state lists of eligible voters who are citizens. The U.S. Postal Service would then use the lists provided by states to assess if voters should be allowed to vote by mail. On Monday, justices ruled 6 to 3 that California and 22 other states lacked standing to sue over the issue. The ruling, however, did not address whether Trump had authority to impose the rules.

The court’s three liberal justices dissented. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned that the majority opinion “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.”

In related news, on Tuesday, a federal judge in Massachusetts found the Trump administration violated a court injunction by finalizing new regulations with the U.S. Postal Service that would overhaul voting by mail nationwide if they’re enforced. While Trump has repeatedly attacked mail-in voting, he continues to vote by mail himself. Voting records in Florida show the president voted by mail in the recent Republican primary. He requested a ballot in late July. The ballot was returned on August 13th.

Well, we’re joined now by Ari Berman, national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones. His new piece is titled ”SCOTUS Hands Trump a Temporary Win in His Crusade to Restrict Mail Voting.” Berman is author of the book Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People — and the Fight to Resist It.

Welcome back to the program, Ari. If you could just respond to this news, the latest news?

ARI BERMAN: Hi, Nermeen. Thank you for having me back on the show.

So, what the Supreme Court did is it temporarily allowed Trump’s executive order severely restricting mail voting to go into effect. It said it was too early for states to challenge this. And this leads to a lot of uncertainty going into the midterms, because the Trump executive order would radically restrict vote by mail.

It would instruct the Department of Homeland Security to create lists of voters it deems citizens. These lists are likely to be highly inaccurate, based on the fact that the Department of Homeland Security has already made these egregious claims of voter fraud that have turned out not to be true. And then it says that the Postal Service can only deliver mail ballots based on these DHS lists, and, moreover, it will only deliver mail ballots in states that hand over their voter rolls, which include sensitive personal information, to the federal government.

This is essentially a form of extortion. The Department of Justice is 0 and 23 in federal court trying to force states to hand over their voter rolls, but the Postal Service is saying that “We’re not going to deliver your mail ballot, unless you hand over this information to the Trump administration.” So, it basically radically changes how mail voting would work in the U.S. It radically changes the job of the Postal Service from delivering the mail to essentially determining who gets a mail ballot. And if it ultimately goes into effect, it could disenfranchise millions of voters in November.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And could you explain, Ari, what is Trump’s kind of personal animus against mail-in voting? He apparently thinks that he lost the 2020 election to Biden because of mail-in votes?

ARI BERMAN: Yes, he blames mail-in voting for his defeat in 2020, even though he clearly lost for other reasons, namely his handling of the pandemic — although Trump himself has voted by mail repeatedly. He voted by mail in Florida’s primary in August. He voted by mail earlier in a state legislative election. So, it seems like Trump’s attitude towards mail voting is “mail voting for me, but not for thee.”

And the fact is, one in three Americans voted by mail in the 2024 election. It is an increasingly popular way of voting for a number of different reasons. There are states that conduct their elections entirely by mail. And this would radically change how mail voting works. Instead of mail ballots being sent to all voters in states that have those kind of laws or being accessible to all voters, it would radically restrict mail voting. And the Trump administration would basically decide who does and does not get a mail ballot. And that appears to be plainly unconstitutional, because states, with oversight from Congress, run their elections. The executive branch has basically no say in how mail voting works. So this is a massive power grab by the Trump administration to try to restrict mail voting. And it’s been blessed, at least temporarily, by the Republican majority on the Supreme Court.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, what exactly does it mean? Because right now the Supreme Court ruling does not have any bearing on voters who will vote in the midterm elections. Is that correct?

ARI BERMAN: Yeah, there’s a separate injunction that blocks the Postal Service from carrying out Trump’s executive order. Now the question is: What’s going to happen with that? Is the Supreme Court going to block that lower court ruling? My expectation is that in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision, states and individuals are going to seek a new injunction blocking the Postal Service from carrying out this executive order, essentially arguing that the executive order itself is unconstitutional and the Postal Service has no legal status to carry it out, because the job of the Postal Service is to deliver the mail, not determine who gets a mail ballot.

So, this fight is far from over, but the fact that we’re even having this conversation, less than 70 days out of the midterms, and we’re actually wondering, “Are people going to vote by mail in November?” that is extremely disturbing, because election officials and voters need certainty about whether they will be able to vote by mail and whether their mail ballots will be counted, and right now there’s a lot of uncertainty about that.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Ari, just to give, you know, audiences some sense of what’s at stake, mail ballots are increasingly popular with voters of both parties. And according to federal data, about 30% of all ballots were cast via mail during the 2024 presidential election. And the process is almost entirely secure. A 2025 Brookings Institution study found only about four cases of fraud out of every 10 million mail ballots cast. So, if you could just talk about that? You know, what is at stake in this? And what does Trump think he’ll achieve if this executive order is put in place? Who will be excluded?

ARI BERMAN: Well, you’re right, Nermeen. There has been no evidence shown that mail ballots leads to widespread voter fraud. Every study has found the opposite, that mail voting is safe and secure. So, everything that Trump has said about mail voting has been a lie. And the fact that Trump himself continues to vote by mail shows that he actually doesn’t believe what he’s saying about mail voting.

He clearly wants to do this to hurt the Democratic Party. He believes that Democrats vote by mail in larger numbers than Republicans. That’s certainly been true in more recent elections, but a lot of Republicans also vote by mail. And there’s a number of competitive states this November, in Florida, in Arizona, in Alaska, for example, where a lot of people vote by mail, and a lot of Republicans vote by mail.

So, if Trump’s executive order goes through, a lot of people, a significant number of Americans, will not be able to vote by mail or will have significant trouble casting a mail ballot. That may harm Democrats more than Republicans, but a lot of Republicans are going to be harmed, too. And there could be a lot of collateral damage about this. And the fact is, you’re taking a method of voting that basically one in three Americans use, and you’re basically saying it’s going to be radically changed in the run-up to the election, when mail ballots are going out to voters, to overseas voters, to military voters, in a matter of weeks in certain states.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Could you explain also, Ari, some of the limits on what is permissible prior to the midterms? If you could explain what’s called the Purcell principle, and the fact that under the Constitution, states and Congress determine voting procedures, not the White House or federal agencies?

ARI BERMAN: Yeah, the Constitution is very clear that states, with oversight from Congress, run their elections, that the president has basically no authority to interfere in state elections. So, what the president is trying to do is he’s trying to usurp power to take over voting that he doesn’t actually have.

And when it comes to the Supreme Court, they have been very hypocritical in judging election rules. They have said that it’s too close to the election to challenge, for example, discriminatory voting maps, redistricting plans in places like Texas and Alabama, and allowed those to go into effect. But then they just said in this case regarding mail ballots, it was too soon for states to challenge Trump’s executive order, even though the midterms were just 70 days away. So, in the words of Justice Jackson, they seem to be injecting chaos into the system instead of quashing it.

And the question is: When is it too late? Because if it’s too early now for states to challenge Trump’s executive order, are they supposed to challenge it a month before the election, when people have already begun voting by mail in large numbers?

So, the Supreme Court had a very clear opportunity to make sure the midterms would run smoothly and that people would know that their votes would be counted, and they did just the opposite. They emboldened, at least temporarily, a massive power grab by Trump that could disenfranchise tens of millions of people if it ultimately goes into effect.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, earlier this month, the Center for American Progress issued a report on how the Trump administration is interfering in the 2026 midterm elections. The authors of the report write, quote, “Perhaps no threat to the upcoming election would be more alarming than the possibility that Trump will declare a national emergency to postpone, cancel, or seize control of the midterms.” In February, The Washington Post reported pro-Trump activists have distributed a 17-page draft executive order to declare a national emergency. Ari Berman, your response?

ARI BERMAN: Well, Trump has talked about this. He said, “Stranger things have happened,” in a recent interview. This would be a dramatic escalation of the Trump administration’s attempts to interfere in the midterms. What the administration would do was essentially lie that there was foreign interference in elections. That was basically the purpose of his primetime speech last month. Then they would say there’s some kind of invented, manufactured national emergency that would give us the power to ban mail ballots or to seize voting machines. I think that would clearly be unconstitutional, but it would scare a lot of people, and it would lead to chaos in the midterms. It could lead to, ultimately, a constitutional crisis.

And I think people are concerned whether the Supreme Court, given what they’ve done already, would actually block it, because the Supreme Court seems to be sending a signal that no matter how unconstitutional Trump’s actions are, we are not going to block him from interfering in the midterms. And that has led to a lot of concerns about how the midterms will go and what steps the administration will take to concretely interfere in the midterms. And I think that risk has increased based on what the Supreme Court did on Monday.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Ari Berman, as you’ve mentioned, the executive order, Trump’s executive order, called on the — directed the Department of Homeland Security to create state-by-state lists of eligible voters who are citizens. I mean, if you could elaborate on the implications of that, and also explain: Has the DHS played a role in elections before in American — recent American history?

ARI BERMAN: No. I mean, that’s a really good point, Nermeen. I mean, the DHS should have no role in playing elections. The only role the Department of Homeland Security should play when it comes to elections is stopping some kind of cybersecurity threat to elections. And what they’ve done is they’ve systematically weakened defenses against cybersecurity.

So, they are trying to take power when it comes to elections that the agency should not have. They are trying to inject law enforcement into the election in a way that they should not be doing. And they’re essentially trying to override state voter rolls. People vote based on their registration in a state. The Department of Homeland Security is trying to create these new lists of voters in each state that it claims are citizens. The problem is that that’s not the job of DHS. They don’t have this information. It’s not their constitutional role.

They’ve also made these ludicrous claims of voter fraud. For example, they claimed that 15,000 people, noncitizens, were registered to vote in Nevada. When a closer look was taken at that data, it turned out 185 noncitizens were registered. So they had dramatically overstated the number of noncitizen voting.

And that’s the fear here, is that if voting proceeds based on these DHS lists, it’s going to be inaccurate, it’s going to be unconstitutional, and a lot of legitimate American voters are going to be wrongly labeled as noncitizens and unable to vote — either based on shoddy data or an intentional attempt by the Trump administration to prevent people from voting.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Ari, could you explain, I mean, kind of state by state, in what areas — where are the places from which most — the most people use mail-in voting? Like, what parts of the country, what states, and what areas within states?

ARI BERMAN: Well, certainly, the West Coast of the country conducts their elections almost entirely by mail, places like California, Oregon, Washington. There’s large use of mail voting in Utah. But it’s also used in a lot of swing states: Arizona, Florida, Michigan. These are all places in which a lot of people vote by mail.

And ironically, mail voting was something that was used by Republicans more than Democrats until 2020. It was only in 2020, when Democratic voters took the threat of COVID more seriously than Republican voters, that Democrats began using mail voting in larger numbers. That’s when Trump began to turn on mail voting. That’s when he began to weaponize the Postal Service.

And he’s repeating that strategy today. He is once again blaming mail voting because it appears that his party is going to lose — the same thing he did in 2020. And he’s once again weaponing the Postal Service to try to undermine mail voting, because that’s how people are going to get their mail ballots. So, we’ve seen this playbook before. He tried it in 2020. It ultimately didn’t work. And the hope is, is that it ultimately won’t work in 2026, as well.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Thanks so much, Ari Berman. We’re going to leave it there. Ari Berman, national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones. We’ll link to your new piece, ”SCOTUS Hands Trump a Temporary Win in His Crusade to Restrict Mail Voting.” Berman is also the author of the book Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People — and the Fight to Resist It.