Erik Katz, Notus: President Donald Trump’s push to have the U.S. Postal Service screen voters for eligibility in the midterm election is running up against tight deadlines that some officials are warning will cause massive errors and disenfranchisement.
The Supreme Court this week temporarily allowed the Postal Service to move forward with a new plan — based on a Trump executive order — that would require states to submit lists of their eligible voters to the mailing agency, which would then ensure no ballots are mailed to individuals not on those lists.
While the rule faces several renewed legal challenges, USPS now has just weeks until some states begin sending out ballots ahead of the November elections, and it has to bring thousands of state and local offices up to speed on the new steps.
USPS has proposed something it has never done before, which would require a heavy lift, said Tom Day, a Postal Service executive for 35 years who spent parts of his career personally responsible for developing the network technology the agency would need to carry out its rule.
“This is not something where you just flip the switch and turn it on,” said Day, an appointed member of the Postal Regulatory Commission since 2023. “I don’t know how the hell they’re going to do it.”
Under Trump’s order, the agency must develop a process to cross-reference all outgoing ballots against still-to-be-submitted lists from states. While the Postal Service has for decades automated the processing of mail and reading of addresses, it has not used those capabilities to pick out mailers ineligible to use its network.
While states will maintain full control over who is on their eligibility lists, a final regulation put forward last week calls on USPS to do exactly that.
The Postal Service is currently working on technical solutions to implement the rule, according to a source familiar with the planning, who added that the agency is focusing on ensuring its review of mailed ballots against state-provided lists is error-free.
Day, however, said that was an impossible goal and erroneously denied ballots are inevitable.
“No system works at 100% accuracy,” he said.
The Postal Service typically would spend at least a year rolling out a new system like the one that will be required for ballot screening, hold a conference for all impacted jurisdictions and provide training to 8,000 election boards around the country, Day said.
He noted that without all of those steps, and with some states sending out ballots as soon as early September, he expects a 20% to 30% error rate, “and that would be a disaster.”
“We haven’t run the tests to give us the validity that the damn thing will work,” Day said. “To do it in three weeks, my God, there’s no way.”