Nearly half the states and voting rights groups are warning the Supreme Court that it might be impossible to comply with a new U.S. Postal Service rule for the midterm elections.
Amid the Trump administration’s legal push to implement the rule, new filings on Wednesday from 23 states, the District of Columbia and voting groups stressed that the USPS has not developed key parts of the system that would heap additional work on state election officials.
“The efforts that state and local elections officials would have to undertake to even begin an attempt at compliance are herculean,” the filing from the states says.
“Each step of this process is fraught with an extreme risk of error,” it continues. “And even if state and local officials were somehow able to implement the new rule perfectly, there is a high risk of technical breakdown, ineptitude, and delay on the part of USPS.”
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The Trump administration has asked the justices to lift a lower court decision that has blocked key parts of the USPS rule through Election Day, Nov. 3. It is the latest development in a legal clash that has already been to the Supreme Court once, and now puts the issue back before the justices.
The states argue the harms to the election outweigh the government’s fears about the possibility of voter fraud. In the published rule, the USPS wrote that it has the legal authority to carry out the rule, “whether or not voter fraud is common or uncommon.”
That, the filing says, unravels the administration’s argument that there will be “irreparable harm” if the courts don’t allow the USPS to enforce the rule.
With the midterm elections just weeks away, the states and voting groups emphasize that complying with new rules on how to vote by mail could disenfranchise millions of voters.
That includes an approval process for ballot envelopes — which many states have already purchased for their primaries and may have to return — and upgrading systems to comply with a new Intelligent Mail barcode, or IMb, for every ballot.
For California, that requirement would mean updating the systems in all 58 counties. California’s statewide voter-registration system “is not currently equipped to receive IMb information for individual voters from county election management systems,” the state’s filing says, and those county systems are not prepared “to store and transmit” IMb information.
The process also requires uploading the information of every eligible voter into the USPS Ballot Portal. That database is untested and completely new to election officials, who will need to train staff on how it’s used, the states told the justices.
North Carolina has already begun to mail out ballots, and a handful of other states are mailing ballots in September.
Wisconsin, which has to send out ballots by Sept. 17, added in the filing that it would be impossible for it to comply.
“Wisconsin’s envelopes could only become mailable under the new USPS rule if the State’s elections officers could ‘print and hand-affix stickers with the Rule-compliant IMb codes on’ each envelope,” the filing said. “But that labor-intensive solution invites errors that risk disenfranchising voters.”
Voting rights groups added that the changes this close to an election would disenfranchise eligible voters, particularly those who “must vote by mail due to age, disabilities, language-assistance needs, college attendance, residence in rural areas, and other reasons.”
The USPS has made it clear that if a batch of ballots has errors, which could include thousands of ballots, the ballots will not be delivered. With no margin for error but a lack of safeguards for states that would have to use new technology and systems, voting rights groups expressed little confidence that the new rules would not disrupt the voting process.
“And even if compliance were possible, the members would still face substantial risk of disenfranchisement, given the high likelihood that millions of ballots will be rejected from the Rule’s rushed implementation and zero-tolerance verification regime,” voting rights groups said in the filing. “Disenfranchisement is not only ‘predictable,’ it is ‘Unavoidable.’”
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