Washington — A group of 24 states and the District of Columbia went to court Wednesday in an effort to stop a new U.S. Postal Service rule that would place fresh conditions on mail-in voting before November’s midterm elections.
The agency’s final rule, published last Friday, follows an executive order signed by President Trump in March aimed at imposing stricter procedures for voting by mail. In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Massachusetts, the states contend the policy would disrupt their ability to run established mail voting systems during the midterms and could put voters who rely on mailed ballots at risk of being disenfranchised.
The complaint argues that the Postal Service’s action unlawfully stretches executive authority and intrudes on the power states hold to manage elections under their own statutes and constitutional frameworks.
“The Rule violates the Constitution and federal statutes many times over,” the state attorneys general said. “It displaces state laws adopted pursuant to each State’s constitutional authority to administer elections, erects new USPS functions and ballot mail constraints that are inconsistent with USPS’s governing statutes, flouts USPS’s procedural requirements, violates the Privacy Act, and cannot be reconciled with federal voting rights law.”
They added: “Each of these defects would alone establish the Rule’s unlawfulness. Together, they demonstrate USPS’s utter disregard for the law in carrying out the President’s policy preferences.”
State officials also cautioned that allowing the rule to move forward would force election administrators to redirect staff time, funding and other resources toward complying with the new federal requirements.
The Postal Service rule puts into motion key parts of Mr. Trump’s executive order, which the president has described as an effort to safeguard election integrity. Among other provisions, the policy sets specific design standards for mail ballot envelopes, including the use of trackable barcodes, and requires state election officials to upload the names and addresses of voters slated to receive mail ballots into an online portal.
Those voters would then be added to a state-by-state “Mail-In and Absentee Participation List.” According to the Postal Service, the list is “primarily intended to assist election officials and law enforcement to understand who may have been mailed a ballot, in order to identify potentially anomalous incidents that may merit further investigation.”
The Postal Service “will not play any role in determining voter eligibility, maintaining voter rolls, or counting ballots,” it said.
But the states said that as a result of the rule, they must immediately redesign their mail ballot envelopes to comply with its requirements and seek review from the Postal Service “at significant costs.”
“Plaintiff States’ election officials must also develop new systems at breakneck speed to convey mail voter lists to USPS to ensure that every eligible voter who is entitled to a mail ballot receives one, create new guidance for and train election officials, and educate the public about changes to mail voting,” they said in the suit.
They warned that there may also be an influx of voters who choose to cast their ballots in person instead of by mail because of the Postal Service’s changes.
“In short, they must accomplish multiple Herculean tasks, each necessary to address the disruption caused by the Rule, in a matter of weeks, with limited resources,” the states said.
Nearly all of the states that signed onto the new lawsuit filed an earlier challenge to Mr. Trump’s executive order. A federal district court blocked the administration from implementing key provisions of the order, including the directives for the Postal Service. But the Supreme Court on Monday halted the lower court’s injunction.
In a 6-3 decision that rested on procedural grounds, the high court’s conservative majority said the states filed their lawsuit too soon and found the district court lacked jurisdiction to bar the Trump administration from trying to implement the executive order.
“The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful,” the Supreme Court said in an unsigned decision. “On that score, time will tell.”
On the heels of that decision, Democratic campaign committees have also moved to file new lawsuits challenging the Postal Service’s rule.
