New York Times: President Trump’s legal and rhetorical assault on voting by mail — and the flurry of contradictory court decisions around it — has left voters confused and local officials scrambling just eight weeks before November’s critical midterm elections.
The contortions have county registrars dusting off Election Day contingency plans developed for natural disasters like floods and wildfires. They have struggled to make it through planning meetings before the latest version of the rules change, and many are encouraging voters to avoid the U.S. Postal Service all together.
Among voters, confusion abounds.
“I don’t trust mail-in or in-person, to be honest with you,” said Lori Woo, a 53-year-old teacher from Wildomar, Calif. She has voted both in person and by mail and now wonders whether any of her votes were counted.
Arizona officials have been encouraging voters like Antonio Bergier, an 83-year-old retired geologist, to drop off ballots in person. But he said he didn’t know whether his hometown, Patagonia, or his county, Santa Cruz, had ballot drop boxes — nor would he use them anyway.
Mail, he said, is “the only way they’re getting my vote this year.”
Twenty states are set to mail ballots to voters by Sept. 19, starting with North Carolina, which began sending out absentee ballots on Friday.
“We plan to proceed as planned,” Sam Hayes, the director of North Carolina’s elections board, said at a news conference on Thursday.
But even election officials were reluctant to issue reassuring encomiums.
“I wish that I could tell my constituents to not worry, and I can’t,” said Gabriella Cázares-Kelly, who oversees elections in Pima County, Ariz., where 85 percent of ballots are delivered early or by mail.
In many places with mail-in voting, the bulk of ballots aren’t scheduled to go out for another month. But the response has already begun.
In Los Angeles County, one of the largest voting districts in the nation, elections officers have responded to the uncertainty with ballot distribution and collection plans that were deployed after the devastating Eaton and Palisades wildfires of 2025. Ideas include expanding in-person options like pop-up voting sites, places where people could request and fill out ballots.
“If this is a problem, let’s make it an administrative problem, not a voter problem,” said Dean Logan, the L.A. County registrar. “We do not want voters to be deterred from voting.”
In Arizona, Ms. Cázares-Kelly described a flood of calls from worried voters. During a briefing this week with Arizona’s secretary of state, attorney general and 15 county recorders about the proposed Postal Service mail-ballot rule, news broke of an emergency filing from the Trump administration trying to reinstate parts of the rule a court had blocked.
And in Leon County, Fla., the elections supervisor, Mark Earley, and his team had envelopes with trackable bar codes on every mail ballot, as the Postal Service wanted. But this week, when the county submitted its envelope for inspection, federal officials rejected it. Mr. Earley worries there isn’t enough time to revamp the envelopes, get the Postal Service’s approval and send ballots.
“If the rule goes into effect, we will have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised voters in Florida,” he said. “And nationwide, millions, without a doubt.”