Trump’s War on Mail-In Voting

The Daily

In a high-stakes move just weeks before the midterm elections, President Trump has asked the Supreme Court to uphold an executive order rest

Key takeaways

• The Trump administration's executive order seeks to use the Postal Service as an arbiter of mail-in voting eligibility, creating unprecedented federal control over state elections.
• A key provision requires states to upload voter data to a Postal Service portal; failure to comply could result in no mail ballots being sent out.

Main topics

• Mail-in voting restrictions
• Supreme Court involvement in elections

Notable quotes

"Turning this agency into this kind of partisan political operator so close to an election is just something we haven't seen."

Conclusion

As the midterms approach, Trump's effort to centralize control over mail-in voting through

Transcript preview

Speaker 6 (0:00) 33 presidents. I Speaker 5 (0:01) called the president at 4.30 Speaker 7 (0:02) in the morning and he answered. Speaker 6 (0:04) Seven decades in space. We want to see what's beyond the next star. 60 Super Sundays. They were probably the best team in the league every single year. 53,500 puzzles. I Speaker 2 (0:13) use the same starting word every day. Speaker 6 (0:16) 25,000 recipes. Speaker 2 (0:18) And I love a one pan recipe because I don't love washing pans. Speaker 6 (0:21) The New York Times. Celebrating 175 years of helping you understand the world. Subscribe now for a special offer at nytimes.com slash subscribe. From Speaker 7 (0:33) the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. On Tuesday, President Trump asked the Supreme Court to bless his audacious plan to restrict voting by mail just weeks before a high-stakes midterm election. Today, my colleague Nick Corosaniti takes us inside Trump's plan, the legal battle that it's touched off, and the uncertainty that it's created for both local election officials and voters across the country. It's Wednesday, September 9th. Speaker 7 (1:26) Nick, thank you for making time for us. Speaker 5 (1:29) Thanks for having me. Speaker 7 (1:30) My pleasure. So looking at the calendar, we are, I believe, just days away in a few states from the official beginning of early voting in this year's midterm elections. And I think rightfully, a lot of our listeners are confused about the state of mail-in ballots, which have become a huge way that a lot of the country votes because of the actions that have been taken by the president. and how much they've become tied up in the courts. So can you just explain the situation that we are in at a very high level? Speaker 5 (2:04) Absolutely. And one thing really quick is that early voting in a way has already begun. Speaker 7 (2:09) On Speaker 5 (2:09) Friday, North Carolina and Delaware started sending out mail ballots. So there are ballots that are on their way to voters as we speak. They're Speaker 7 (2:19) in the system. Speaker 5 (2:20) They're in the system. They're either being processed by the Speaker 3 (2:23) Postal Service or maybe they already arrived. Speaker 5 (2:25) But where we are in this moment is not to repeatedly use the phrase unprecedented, but something that we've never seen before, which is the president and the executive branch seeking to leverage an agency, in this case, the United States Postal Service, to change how elections are run. And this stems from an executive order that the president signed earlier this year. seeking to restrict mail voting and basically turning the Postal Service into an arbiter of which states can have mail voting. Speaker 7 (3:00) Turning the Postal Service, which we usually think of as kind of a neutral player in our election system, literally the people who carry the votes to the people who need them and then bring them back to the election offices, turning that into an organization that gets to decide if your vote ever counts. Speaker 5 (3:18) or at least gets to decide whether you can cast your vote, Speaker 7 (3:21) whether Speaker 5 (3:22) a state can have mail voting at all, or whether a voter is able to receive their mail ballot. Turning this agency into this kind of partisan political operator so close to an election is just something we haven't seen, especially in the past decade with mail voting becoming so critical to a large part of the American electorate. Speaker 7 (3:43) Just how critical is mail-in voting at this point post-pandemic? when I know there was a major increase in mail-in voting. Speaker 5 (3:51) Yeah, the pandemic kind of changed everything. And while mail voting isn't at the same clip that it was in 2020, still nearly 30 % of Americans cast a ballot by mail in the 2024 elections. Now, that's tens of millions of voters. Right. There's eight states that conduct their elections almost entirely by mail. So there's a large amount of Americans whose votes you know, are very much wrapped up in this. And Speaker 7 (4:18) Nick, is the right way to think about the president's motivation here for mucking around with the role of the Postal Service when it comes to mail-in ballots in this midterm election, simply that he's seeking political advantage for Republicans in this election? Speaker 5 (4:33) I mean, the president himself has said if we can limit mail voting or restrict these mail ballots, then that'll help Republicans win. So he's been very explicit about this. But he's also doubted mail voting for the better part of a decade. I was with him in Colorado in 2016, where he went on a tangent at a campaign event, casting doubt on the mail voting process in that state, a state that conducts its elections mostly by mail. And then following his loss in 2020, where scores of Democrats chose to vote by mail to vote safely in the pandemic, the president blamed it for his loss. And ever since then, he's been obsessed with this idea without any evidence that mail voting is rife with Speaker 7 (5:17) fraud. Well, just explain exactly where we are logistically in the president's attempts to change the role of the Postal Service in these midterm elections. and where all his efforts stand legally. To understand exactly where we're Speaker 5 (5:32) at, we have to go back to last year. Speaker 5 (5:36) The president is clearly realizing that the midterms are moving away from him. There's a lot going on politically against President Trump. Stubborn and rising inflation. There was backlash against ICE raids happening in American cities. Reverberation still from Doge. And so he starts looking at different ways to leverage all the different agencies within his power. Whether that's the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, he's using all of these to shape the elections. Speaker 8 (6:06) Well, thank you very much. This was a meeting set up. So fast forward to March, and Speaker 5 (6:11) that's where the Postal Service comes into play. Because Speaker 8 (6:14) the cheating on mail-in voting is legendary. It's horrible what's going on. Speaker 5 (6:18) The White House announces that President Trump will be making big changes to the way that the Postal Service interacts with the election system. Speaker 8 (6:28) So with all of that, I'm very happy to be signing the voter integrity, and I think it's going to be really great. So if you don't mind, I will take some time and I'll make this signature absolutely perfect. Speaker 5 (6:41) He signs an executive order that does a host of things regarding mail voting. Speaker 8 (6:46) So far, so good. Speaker 5 (6:52) So the two most important parts of this executive order empower the Postal Service to play