Under proposed rules implementing President Trump's executive order on mail voting, the U.S. Postal Service would deliver mail-in ballots only for states that hand over a list of their eligible mail voters to the federal government, CNN reported June 10, 2026. State election officials would face a stark choice: provide the voter lists or risk losing Postal Service delivery of their ballots.
Trump's March 2026 executive order seeks to give the Postal Service an unprecedented role in the midterm elections, not just delivering ballots but policing who receives one. The USPS would be instructed to transmit ballots only for states that have given the federal government a list of eligible mail voters at least 60 days before the election and met technical requirements for USPS automated tracking. The Justice Department said the Department of Homeland Security is working to make “citizenship list information” available to states; the order also directs DHS to build citizenship lists for each state, raising concerns about voter-roll purges.
Administering elections is a power the Constitution assigns to the states, and three lawsuits have already challenged the order as unconstitutional (see Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump Appointee, Declined in May to Block Trump's Mail-Voting Order, Then Blocked the Postal Service Rule in September).
On June 24, 2026, Postmaster General David Steiner confirmed the policy under oath at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing. Asked by Sen. Gary Peters whether the Postal Service would deliver ballots to states that refuse to provide their voter rolls, Steiner said, “Under our proposed regulation? No,” adding that the Postal Service would “tell the state that we need the manifest.” Peters called it a way to “coerce” states and “a back-door way for the federal government to get voting information that states control under the Constitution.”