Local election officials are reeling over the “logistical nightmare” of Trump’s vote-by-mail order

As election officials across the country prepare for the midterm elections in less than five months, President Donald Trump’s order restricting mail-in voting threatens to upend their preparations.

The executive order directs the U.S. Postal Service to refuse to deliver ballots to states that do not provide voter rolls or meet other requirements. This has created a sense of deep uncertainty and concern among election officials as they consider how to comply, according to a review of court documents and interviews with election officials and election administration experts.

March 31st Implementing regulationand a suggestion Postal service rule They say the order published June 2, which would put the order’s requirements into effect, would create stern logistical and procedural challenges for those conducting elections. Rural areas with constrained resources are particularly at risk, but jurisdictions of all sizes could be forced into disarray.

The executive order is the latest move by Trump to seize control of state elections, alongside the stalled SAVE America Act, which would require voters to provide documents proving their citizenship. The Trump-controlled Justice Department is also trying to obtain state voter lists.

“This is just another death in a thousand cuts that public officials have suffered since the 2020 election,” said Barb Byrum, the Democratic clerk of Ingham County, Michigan, which includes Lansing.

First ever national voter list

The order and rule require states to provide it Lists of postal voters If they want the Postal Service to deliver ballots, this is the first time the federal government has created a national voter list.

Envelopes for mail-in ballots must meet certain design standards. And federal agencies must prepare lists of voting-age citizens to provide to each state to exclude noncitizen voters.

But Democratic states and voting rights groups argue that the executive order — and the accompanying proposed rule — constitutes law an illegal transgression by Trump because states conduct elections in accordance with the US Constitution. Trump and his Republican allies say the restrictions are necessary for election security and to combat extremely occasional voter turnout by non-citizens.

The Postal Service did not respond to questions from the state newsroom. The agency said the rule will “facilitate the faithful implementation of federal law.”

Several lawsuits were filed against the order, but a federal judge in Washington, DC, ruled in May rejected to stop it, in part because the Trump administration had not taken enough action to implement its requirements. Another federal judge in Massachusetts is considering a separate request to block the order.

With the executive order still in effect, at least for now, election officials and experts who work with them are taking the impact of this order and the proposed Postal Service rule seriously.

“We don’t have a national voter registration list. We don’t currently have a list of sanctioned, authorized voters who are allowed to vote by mail at the federal level,” said Tammy Patrick, chief program officer at the Election Center, which is operated by the National Association of Election Officials. “This is a big, big change in the way elections have always been conducted.”

Comprehensive changes very quickly

In court documents submitted in MayLocal election officials and local governments representing 26 jurisdictions across the country warned the executive order would “significantly disrupt” local election administration and force the implementation of sweeping changes within months. They argued that implementing the ordinance’s requirements will largely fall to local election officials.

Byrum was among the officials who signed the order, along with others in Boston and counties in Pennsylvania, Washington, Wisconsin and elsewhere.

Under the executive order, states that want to send ballots by mail must provide the Postal Service with lists of voters they want to send by mail ballot. According to court filings, local election officials will play a immense role in helping states develop these lists and will be primarily responsible for helping voters correct any errors.

And Trump wants everything to be finished before November. The schedules proposed in the executive order “represent a logistical nightmare for local election officials,” officials warn.

“The general rule is don’t make any changes before a big election because there’s always something you haven’t thought about,” said Carolina Lopez, executive director of the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions, a nonpartisan organization for election officials in jurisdictions with at least 250,000 residents.

The proposed Postal Service rule says the agency would launch a portal where states would submit voter lists and make updates. But a number of questions still remain, said Lopez, who previously ran elections in Miami-Dade County, Florida, for a decade.

The portal risks creating bottlenecks in the voting system and it is unclear what would happen if it ever went offline. The United States has a decentralized electoral system, with each state conducting its own elections. By contrast, the Postal Service portal would create a single point of failure and raise concerns about the security of information about tens of millions of voters.

Additionally, while every state maintains a voter registration list, there is no national standard for formatting this data. It’s unclear whether the portal will accept data in different formats – the proposed rule simply states that the Postal Service would not change the data provided by states.

“Things look a little different across the country and so normalizing the data will be a process,” Lopez said.

Fight for compact, rural districts

The Ministry of Justice originally said A court document said the Department of Homeland Security had previously planned to obtain voter data from the Postal Service resign a few days later. Nevertheless, Homeland Security continues to have “preliminary discussions” about data sharing, the Justice Department said in a subsequent court filing.

DHS operates the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system, which can scan voter data to identify possible noncitizens. The Justice Department has sued 30 states to force them to release their unredacted voter rolls, which contain sensitive personal information such as dates of birth, driver’s license and full or partial Social Security numbers, in order to pass the information through SAVE.

The proposed Postal Service rule also imposes standards for ballot envelopes that states must meet if they want to send ballots by mail.

Envelopes must contain a ballot letter logo, be automated and have a barcode that allows tracking. These are already considered best practices — and many jurisdictions across the country already follow them — but the rule would make them mandatory.

Election offices in compact, rural counties may struggle to comply. In many places, a single person is responsible for elections and may not even be in office full time, Patrick said.

“There are rural offices all over the country, some of them don’t have their own computer in their office – they share it with the tax man or whatever – they don’t have the ability to generate these serialized tracking codes, smart postal barcodes,” Patrick said. “Because they physically hand-label these envelopes or use a stamp with their address on it.”

Neither the executive order nor the proposed Postal Service rule provides for federal funding for implementation, which would likely need to be appropriated by Congress.

Some Republican states have pushed for the executive order. A dozen Republican attorneys general Court documents filed defends the order, arguing that it will “increase the security of mail-in voting.”

“It is critical to the strength of our republic that we ensure that only American citizens participate in our elections and that absentee and absentee ballots are secure and reliable,” South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson said in a statement earlier this spring.

But Matt Crane, a Republican and executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, said the executive order and proposed rule represent an overreach of federal government duties that are better left to states and local governments.

The biggest reaction among Colorado employees, he said, was: “Why?”

“No offense to our friends at the post office,” Crane said, “but I trust our processes more than theirs.”