A new USPS proposal would require states to provide the agency with names and addresses of residents who vote by mail, along with names and barcodes tied to mail-in ballots for federal elections—an expansion of federal control that follows President Trump’s pu
On Friday, the U.S. Postal Service laid out a plan that would force states to hand over detailed information about mail-in voting—down to names, addresses, and barcode-linked ballot data for federal elections.
Under the proposal, USPS would require states to provide the names and addresses of residents who vote by mail. States would also have to share names and barcodes linked to mail-in ballots for federal elections.
The move lands in the middle of President Trump’s broader campaign against mail-in voting. For months. he has pointed to the practice as a target. promising to “lead a movement to get rid of mail-in ballots.” He has repeatedly linked mail voting to voter-fraud claims that have been debunked. a stance that has drawn pushback from election administrators and voting-rights advocates.
Trump has framed the issue in blunt terms. “Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating. I call it mail-in cheating, and we got to do something about it all,” he said earlier this year.
The USPS proposal is not coming out of a vacuum. In late March. Trump signed an executive order requiring the Department of Homeland Security to create a list of verified American citizens eligible to vote. The federal agency would then provide the list to states and direct state attorneys general to investigate and prosecute “election officials. individuals. and other entities that violate the law” for giving federal ballots to ineligible voters.
On Thursday, a federal judge declined to block Trump’s new restrictions on mail-in voting.
Taken together. the sequence shows Trump pressing the federal government to move closer to the mechanics of elections—something that has collided with the long-standing role of states. The executive order aims to wrest power away from state election authorities by deputizing the USPS to send out ballots and track them using a new federal envelope and barcode system.
Trump wants that hands-on approach, but the Constitution places authority to run elections with states. The proposal runs into the same constitutional tension that has followed Trump’s election arguments. In a Truth Social post last year. Trump claimed. “States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. ” adding. “They must do what the Federal Government. as represented by the President of the United States. tells them. FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY. to do.”.
The contradiction has been hard for critics to ignore. Despite his attacks on mail-in voting, Trump mailed in his own ballot during a recent Florida special election.
Mail-in voting fraud, however, is rare. A recent analysis by the Brookings Institution found that mail-in voting fraud is extraordinarily uncommon. affecting only four of every 10 million mail-in votes. In Oregon—where universal vote-by-mail has been in place for more two decades—only a dozen cases of confirmed fraud were documented between 2000 and 2020.
Universal vote-by-mail is also concentrated in parts of the country that reliably elect Democrats. Oregon, Washington, and California all use the system, and Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Vermont, and Washington D.C. use mail-in voting that automatically sends all eligible voters a ballot through the mail.
For now, the USPS proposal adds a fresh layer to an already charged debate: whether election oversight should expand through federal systems that track and collect mail-ballot identifiers, or whether states should keep control over how ballots are distributed and handled.
With a judge refusing to halt Trump’s restrictions, the next question is how far the federal push will go—and what it will require from states asked to surrender more information about who votes by mail and how those ballots are encoded and tracked.
USPS mail-in voting election rules voter data barcode system federal elections Trump Department of Homeland Security executive order federal judge