In a letter to Postmaster General David Steiner, the seven Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC) demanded Friday that the US Postal Service (USPS) halt implementation of new mail-ballot procedures required by President Donald Trump’s executive order. The senators also want answers about the legal authority for those new procedures no later than September 11, saying, “We reiterate our call to halt your breakneck implementation of the President’s unlawful order and rescind the final rule on federal ballot mail.”
Trump issued Executive Order 14399, “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections,” on March 31. The order directs the Department of Homeland Security, in coordination with the Social Security Administration, to compile state lists of individuals confirmed to be US citizens who will be at least 18 and reside in the state. It separately directs USPS to establish requirements for mail-ballot envelopes, including agency approval and unique Intelligent Mail barcodes. USPS subsequently issued its final “Ballot Mail for Federal Elections” rule, which took effect August 21 and was published in the Federal Register August 26.
A whistleblower disclosure received by HSGAC’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations alleged that the new systems risked “collapsing the absentee ballot system and disenfranchising millions of Americans” and described their development as a “seriously flawed, rushed, and chaotic process” undertaken without adequate testing or normal system standards. The whistleblower specifically alleged that if one barcode failed to scan in a batch of 10,000 ballots, the entire batch would be rejected and returned to the state. A USPS spokesperson told ProPublica that the agency was reviewing the whistleblower’s concerns and had spent months developing the system in a manner consistent with court orders.
The letter sets a deadline of September 11 for USPS to cite the legal authority for its new rule, describe its standards for its new ballot verification processes, and explain its efforts to comply with all recent court orders and injunctions. HSGAC also wants answers to questions that are still outstanding from its hearing on June 24, “Reforming the US Postal Service’s Broken Business Model.”
On Thursday, the administration filed an emergency application asking the Supreme Court to stay an August 27 temporary restraining order issued by the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Solicitor General D. John Sauer filed the application on behalf of USPS and the other federal parties.
On Friday, US District Judge Indira Talwani replaced the temporary restraining order with a preliminary injunction barring USPS from enforcing several provisions of the rule. The states challenging the rule subsequently informed the Supreme Court that the preliminary injunction and dissolution of the TRO had rendered the administration’s application moot.
States are meanwhile preparing to send absentee ballots for the November election. North Carolina’s 100 county boards of elections were scheduled to begin mailing ballots on Friday.
