Trump wanted to change the design of mail-in ballot envelopes. A court just ruled against him

A court ruled on Thursday against implementing new rules that would have required local elections officials to redesign mail-in ballot envelopes right before the election. One reason? There’s not enough time to make the design changes that were being called for.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit said in an opinion Thursday the Trump administration’s proposed rules for how the U.S. Postal Service handles mail-in ballots could “prevent millions of Americans from obtaining and returning their ballots.” The court said “it would be impossible for some states to reprint compliant envelopes” at this point, not to mention “there is no record evidence of past fraud or a likelihood of impending fraud.”

Though President Donald Trump frequently votes by mail himself, he’s long attacked it, and he signed an executive order earlier this year in an attempt to restrict it. Under the rules his administration tried to implement, many local election officials would have to redesign at least one of the envelopes they use, but mail-in ballots for the midterm elections have already started to go out, and many were printed months ago.

Under the administration’s proposed rules, both outbound and return federal ballot envelopes would have had to meet specific design requirements. The rules would require that they are automation compatible, and feature both the Election Mail logo and a unique postal Intelligent Mail barcode (IMb).

The IMb is a barcode that can be found under the destination address on a piece of mail, and it encodes information like mail class and destination routing code. Not all mail has it, and ballot envelopes haven’t been required to include it before, though some jurisdictions do.

While many mail-in ballot envelopes are already designed to be automation compliant and feature the Official Election Mail logo and an IMb, few have that barcode on return envelopes, says Whitney Quesenbery, executive director at the Center for Civic Design, and it’s too late to implement changes. Elections are run by more than 10,000 offices nationwide, and they run on timelines of years and months, not weeks.

“Most envelopes were designed months ago,” Quesenbery tells Fast Company. “Some may have even been printed earlier in the year. Elections offices often order enough envelopes for an entire election cycle at once.”

Since elections are handled locally, states also have their own rules written into statute for how their ballot envelopes are to be designed. In some cases, redesigning them to be automation compliant, for example, would require a special session of the state legislature, says Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer at the National Association of Election Officials.

Most at risk would be small and rural jurisdictions, some of which don’t even have a full-time employee and have volunteers literally writing mail-in ballot envelopes by hand. “They are going to struggle to do any kind of barcode,” Patrick says.

To implement changes of that scale and to test them in time for elections that fall on even-numbered years, they should start in odd-numbered years, she says.

In addition to the mail-in ballot envelope design requirements, the new rules called for a yet-to-be-released online portal for local and federal officials to share voter lists. Last week, a whistleblower said work on the portal has been rushed without enough time to test it.

If the Trump administration’s rules had been upheld, they would have threatened “chaos on multiple levels,” says Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He says he was worried over the possibility of delayed or undelivered ballots, missed deadlines, or issues with the portal and incomplete voter lists that don’t include voters who register later in the fall if they passed.

With the court’s decision, local elections officials being asked to pull off an envelope redesign in a matter of weeks that typically would take months or longer can rest easy.