A day is lost, then another, and then the deadline arrives.
Postal workers themselves understand the danger of being pulled into that chain. Jonathan Smith, president of the American Postal Workers Union, put the responsibility plainly: “It is not the job of the postal workers to verify voter eligibility,” he said. “It is our job to move mail from one destination to the next.”⁵
The proposed rule remains just that: a proposal. It focuses primarily on blank ballots being mailed from election offices to voters, not completed ballots voters have already placed in the mail. It excludes primary elections and military and overseas ballots. Public comments remain open through July 2.²
Legal challenges are moving forward. A federal judge has allowed claims involving the 2026 elections to proceed, although she has not ruled that Trump’s order or the USPS proposal is unlawful. She concluded that waiting could impose serious hardship as the midterms approach.⁶
Since this column was first drafted, the legal pressure has increased. On June 22, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan blocked the Trump administration from using a revamped Department of Homeland Security immigration database, known as SAVE, to check state voter rolls. Voting-rights and privacy advocates argued that the system could wrongly flag naturalized citizens and other eligible voters. The judge wrote that the federal government had “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”⁷
That ruling does not directly block the USPS ballot-mail proposal. But it matters because the administration’s mail-voting plan is part of a broader attempt to move election decisions into federal databases and federal checkpoints. The danger is not only that the Postal Service might reject a batch of ballots. The larger danger is that an eligible voter can be made invisible by a file, a portal or a mismatch she cannot see and may not have time to correct.
USPS should use the comment period to withdraw the rule. It should offer election offices better technology, better tracking and better technical assistance. It should test systems before elections rather than during them. Its job is to help ballots move faster and more reliably, not to create a new federal reason for lawful ballots to go nowhere.
Shelley Powers waited 12 days and had three left. Her question was what happens when people do not receive their ballots in time.
The answer is painfully simple: Some of them do not get to vote.
The Postal Service has one duty here: Take the ballots, move the ballots and deliver the ballots.
Democracy should not be marked return to sender.