With barely two months remaining before Americans decide control of Congress, the Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court for permission to conduct an extraordinary experiment with the nation’s ballots.
The U.S. Postal Service exists to deliver the mail. It does not exist to decide which Americans are entitled to receive election ballots.
That elementary distinction is being obliterated by an administration racing to impose a new mail-ballot system just as voting is beginning — a system so untested that, at a federal court hearing Thursday, the government could not even say whether the computer portal at the center of it was operational.
Yet the Justice Department wants the Supreme Court to let the administration proceed anyway. This is not election administration. It is electoral Russian roulette.
President Donald Trump’s plan would require states and local governments to submit information about mail voters through a new federal portal and use specially designed ballot envelopes carrying individualized barcodes. The Postal Service could refuse ballot mail that fails to satisfy the requirements.
Think about the implications.
In the 2020 general election, a record approximately 65 million Americans cast their ballots by mail, while the U.S. Election Assistance Commission reported that more than 48 million mail-in votes were cast in 2024.
A government agency whose mission is to deliver the mail would suddenly become a federal checkpoint standing between voters and their ballots.
States that have administered elections for generations would be forced to adapt to new federal requirements weeks before Election Day. Election officials have already ordered and printed ballot envelopes. Some ballots are already entering the mail.
And the government wants to change the machinery now.
There could hardly be a worse moment — unless disruption is the point.
The administration says the requirements are modest safeguards against fraud and insists the Postal Service would not determine voter eligibility. But the administration has produced no evidence of widespread mail-voting fraud requiring this emergency transformation of the electoral system.
What does exist is abundant evidence that the new machinery is not ready.
Postal officials say they are still making “refinements” to the Federal Ballot Mail Portal. A whistleblower has alleged that the system was developed hastily and could cause enormous batches of legitimate ballots to be rejected because of technical errors.
No responsible government rolls out an experimental voting system affecting millions of citizens immediately before a national election.
Especially not when the president demanding the change has a documented history of trying to overturn an election he lost.
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s final report on the 2020 election case said a federal grand jury charged Trump with four felonies arising from his efforts to unlawfully retain power through fraud and deceit.
The case was ultimately dismissed after Trump returned to office because of the Justice Department’s longstanding policy against prosecuting a sitting president — not because the evidence against him evaporated.
Smith wrote that his office believed the admissible evidence was sufficient “to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.”
That history makes blind trust in Trump’s motives not merely naive but reckless.
Nor is the timing politically neutral.
Republicans are approaching the Nov. 3 elections in serious trouble. An August Emerson College poll of likely voters put Democrats ahead 51% to 43% on the generic congressional ballot, while Trump’s approval stood at 40% and disapproval at 56%. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Aug. 31 put Trump’s approval even lower, at 33%, and found Democrats substantially more enthusiastic about voting than Republicans.
Now an administration facing the possibility of losing control of Congress wants to rewrite rules governing millions of mail ballots.
Perhaps Americans are supposed to believe this is coincidence.
They should not.
The Constitution explicitly gives Congress the power to establish post offices and post roads. Election administration is principally entrusted to the states, subject to congressional authority. Nothing in the Constitution appoints the president national supervisor of absentee ballots.
There is also a reason federal law treats interference with the mail seriously. Under 18 U.S.C. § 1701, anyone who knowingly and willfully obstructs or delays the passage of mail can face fines and imprisonment.
Whether Trump’s particular scheme violates that statute would ultimately be a question for courts and prosecutors. But the principle behind the law could hardly be clearer: Americans are entitled to a postal system that carries their mail rather than deliberately impedes it.
A ballot is not contraband.
A voter is not a suspect.
And a postal worker should never be transformed into an election gatekeeper.
The most chilling aspect of this controversy is therefore not some hypothetical computer malfunction. It is the creation of machinery capable of preventing legitimate ballots from reaching legitimate voters — or throwing an election into chaos when technical failures inevitably occur.
Even if every person designing the system acted with perfect good faith, attempting such an enormous change weeks before a federal election would be irresponsible.
Doing it at the direction of Donald Trump is something considerably more alarming.
The American people already watched Trump refuse to accept his 2020 defeat. They watched the campaign to overturn certified results culminate in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. They later learned, through Smith’s investigation, how extensive the effort to remain in power had been.
America does not owe Trump another opportunity to experiment with its elections.
If Republicans lose Congress on Nov. 3, they should lose because Americans voted them out. If they win, they should win because Americans voted them in.
The Postal Service has one job in that process:
Deliver the ballots.
Not inspect the electorate. Not impose last-minute barriers. Not rescue an unpopular political party from its voters. And certainly not become an instrument through which a president can place his thumb on the electoral scale.
The Supreme Court should stop this reckless experiment before a technical “error” becomes a constitutional crisis.
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