President Donald Trump wants to sharply curtail mail ballots. He’s called them “inherently corrupt” and baselessly condemned them as a major source of fraud.

But with Republicans falling behind in the polls, the president is now urging his supporters to vote in the midterm elections any way they can, including by mail.

The White House has also sent emails through a government account promoting voter registration in recent days and Trump is continuing a string of campaign rallies in typically conservative states, including Nebraska on Monday night. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has directed that members of the military, who tend to support Republicans, have a day off to vote.

“If your state has early voting, do not wait. Go out and vote. Vote early, vote by mail, or vote in person on Election Day, November 3rd, so we can defeat the radical left ‘Dumocrats’ in a midterm victory that is too big to rig,” Trump said in a social media video over the weekend, using a derogatory term for Democrats.

The about-face by the president is familiar. Trump encouraged his voters to cast their ballots by mail in 2024 and has repeatedly voted by mail himself, despite a long record of attacking the practice.

Republicans battle against loss of majorities

The latest comments — along with the red-state rallies — underscore the political peril that analysts see facing Republicans and Trump. 

If Republicans lose control of either the House or Senate, Democrats are likely to launch investigations into the White House that could complicate the president’s final two years in office. A Democratic House would face pressure from the base to pursue impeachment against Trump or other administration officials.

Democrats enjoy an 11-point advantage over Republicans on the generic congressional ballot, according to a nonpartisan September national poll by Emerson College. The poll also found Democrats more enthusiastic, with 78% “very excited” to vote compared to 66% of Republicans. 

A poll by The New York Times and Siena College, released Saturday, found Democrats ahead or tied in Senate races in several GOP-leaning states, including Alaska, Kansas, Ohio and Texas. 

Several of those same states — including Alaska, Kansas and Ohio — allow voters to cast a ballot by mail without providing an excuse. Iowa also features a highly competitive Senate race and has no-excuse absentee voting, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Vice President JD Vance was visiting Alaska on Monday to campaign for the Republican Senate candidate, while Trump was scheduled to hold a rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, where the incumbent Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts faces a competitive challenge from independent Dan Osborn. 

‘We seem to have no choice’

Republicans are scrambling to find ways to turn out their base voters, said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. The immediate objective for the party is maximizing voter turnout among their supporters, he said, adding that discouraging them from using legal methods to vote would be an obvious electoral disadvantage.

“The overriding concern for the White House is turnout, not consistency,” Rottinghaus said. “The political messaging has been inconsistent on this. But all of that aside, the need to get Republicans to come vote is paramount for Republicans.”

Trump at the White House on Monday said that he prefers voters to cast their ballots in person but that they can “vote by mail if they want because we seem to have no choice.” Without offering evidence, he alleged significant cheating in voting by mail.

Pressed by reporters for evidence, the president pointed to California. The blue state, where all voters receive a ballot in the mail, has drawn his ire in the past for a vote-counting process that can last weeks, in part because of ballots that arrive in the mail after Election Day. But a slow count isn’t evidence of fraud.

When asked about Trump’s shifting stance, the White House referred States Newsroom to the president’s Monday remarks.

Supreme Court blocked Trump

Trump’s decision to again tout voting by mail — while also attacking it — came after he spent months pursuing a high-stakes effort to impose restrictions on mail ballots. 

In August 2025, Trump promised to lead a movement to eliminate mail-in voting. 

Less than a year later, he signed an executive order directing the U.S. Postal Service to require states, at least 90 days before a federal election, to notify the Postal Service whether they intended to allow ballots to be sent through the mail. States would have then had to submit to USPS a list of voters planning to vote by mail at least 60 days before the election.

Postmaster General David Steiner had said that the Postal Service wouldn’t deliver ballots for states that refused to comply with the rule. Democrats and other opponents said it would have given the Postal Service unprecedented and unconstitutional authority over elections, which are administered by the states under the Constitution.

The U.S. Supreme Court blocked the rule from taking effect in a one-paragraph order that upheld a lower court decision halting it. Election officials and voting rights advocates had warned that implementing the requirements so close to the election would have caused chaos.

Trump railed against the decision at the time, calling it a “big loss” for Republicans and alleging it would make cheating by Democrats on mail-in ballots much easier. “And now they have open field to do so,” he wrote on social media when the order was issued in mid-September.

On Monday, League of Women Voters President and CEO Celina Stewart emphasized that the Trump administration had spent months attacking voting by mail. She said in a statement that while Trump sought to impose restrictions through an executive order — which the League sued over — “the President does not have the authority to unilaterally dictate how states administer elections.”

“A shift in rhetoric does not undo those actions, nor does it erase the need for the League to take this fight to court. We will judge this administration by its actions, not by its latest statement,” Stewart said.

Trump’s attacks on voting by mail

Trump’s attacks on voting by mail stretch back to the 2020 election, when mail voting surged amid the pandemic. 

At that time, he characterized mail ballots arriving after Election Day as fraudulent, even though late-arriving ballots must be postmarked on or before Election Day — indicating that voters made their choices before the close of polls. The Supreme Court this year upheld the authority of states to count mailed ballots that arrive after Election Day.

Six years later, mail-in voting remains a major way for Americans to cast their ballots. Nearly a third of U.S. voters cast a ballot by mail in 2024, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. 

This year, nearly 1 million people have already voted by mail in the general election, with more than 52 million mail ballots requested, according to data compiled by the University of Florida Election Lab.

For campaigns, every ballot a supporter casts by mail represents a “bird in the hand,” said Rottinghaus. By contrast, voters who wait until Election Day remain potential voters, with the risk that something will come up that keeps them from voting.

Campaigns build whole persuasion operations around mail voting, he said, adding that demonizing the practice takes away a weapon some campaigns rely on.

“This is a top-down effort from the most vocal and visible Republican that can create a lot of complications for Republicans down ballot who may rely on mail voting for a big part of their strategy,” Rottinghaus said.

When Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin declared in September that Immigration and Customs Enforcement could serve warrants on individuals at polling places this fall, officials in Denver, a liberal city where roughly 14% of residents are foreign-born, quickly sued.

“Every day we find new things to be astonished about but I think that we just want residents to not be afraid to vote because that’s ultimately what the president was after,” Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, a Democrat, said in an interview.

Johnston and other local and state officials across the country are bracing for possible federal election interference from now through Nov. 3 — even as they remain unsure of what will actually happen.

One month from Election Day, President Donald Trump’s long-running pressure campaign over elections is approaching a decisive moment. For the past year, the Trump administration has sought to bend the U.S. election system to the president’s will across multiple fronts, despite the Constitution’s guarantee that states administer elections.

Interviews and public comments by more than a dozen current and former election officials, legal experts, lawmakers and others ahead of the midterms reveal anxiety over what Trump may do. Election administrators often plan for natural disasters, bomb threats and other possible problems, but this year many are also thinking about possible disruptions driven by the federal government.

Potential scenarios range from armed federal personnel deploying at or near the polls to Trump declaring a national emergency — ideas widely condemned as illegal by election law experts. Homeland Security denies it plans to specifically target polling locations.

Others include efforts to discredit voting machines or federal law enforcement obtaining search warrants to seize ballots, a fear that’s grown since the FBI took 2020 election ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, earlier this year.

Barb Byrum, the county clerk in Ingham County, Michigan, which includes much of Lansing, said that when she became a clerk 13 years ago, she and other officials conducted table-top exercises to plan for power outages and tornadoes. Now it’s moved on to “federal misbehavior,” she said.

“It’s really unfortunate that’s where we are. But that is, in fact, where we are,” Byrum, a Democrat, said in an interview.

Memories of 2020

Fears of election interference are at least partly rooted in previous efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn his 2020 election loss in key swing states, culminating in a mob of his supporters storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The riot led to Trump’s second impeachment in the House on a charge of inciting an insurrection, but the Senate acquitted him.

Nearly six years later, Trump’s approval ratings are sagging and Republicans are fighting to retain control of Congress amid encouraging polling for Democrats. Loss of the House or Senate would effectively end Trump’s legislative agenda and lead to investigations that consume his final two years in office.

“A desperate Trump is a dangerous Trump,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, said during an appearance at the progressive Center for American Progress in September. 

At the same time, Americans’ trust in elections is eroding. Just 49% of respondents said they expect the midterm elections to be free and fair, according to a national survey of more than 5,000 adults in early September conducted by the University of California San Diego Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections.

Still, election officials and legal experts remain largely confident any interference effort ultimately won’t succeed. The United States has a decentralized election system run by state and local officials that guards against large-scale efforts to steal elections or prevent voting, they say, predicting courts would swiftly rule against the deployment of federal agents. 

Many votes are also cast by mail, sidestepping any Election Day show of force. More than 1 million votes have already been cast, according to data compiled by the University of Florida’s Election Lab.

“It’s not going to happen,” David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, told reporters on Tuesday. “You’re not going to have to run a gauntlet. You’re not going to see troops or armed individuals at the polls.”

‘I don’t rule anything out or in’

Trump and his aides refuse to flatly rule out interfering in the midterms. In an interview with TIME magazine published Thursday, Trump declined to take extreme measures off the table. Asked about sending ICE to the polls, he said only that he hadn’t thought of it.

“I don’t rule anything out or in. We’ll see,” Trump said of a national emergency.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has dismissed questions about sending troops to the polls as “another gotcha hypothetical,” though the Department of Defense has said it has no plans to deploy active-duty troops or federalized National Guard members. 

Some Republicans have suggested they would welcome the presence of soldiers if state and local authorities want them. “If that’s something that they decide that they need to look at, then that’s fine with me,” Rep. Mike Collins, a Georgia Republican, told reporters in September.

Mullin, the Homeland Security secretary, last month sought a Department of Justice investigation into whether ballot tabulation machines that read barcodes or QR codes comply with federal law, raising concerns that the Trump administration could create a pretext to dismiss the validity of some ballots. 

The Georgia State Election Board’s executive director recently called on the DOJ to potentially intervene in the state over the use of QR code-based tabulation.

Earlier this year, Mullin also warned that election officials who don’t “participate in securing the elections” could face prosecution. He promised to “hold election officials accountable.”

Roadblocks to interference

But with Election Day nearing, Trump has been stymied on every major initiative to influence the election process this year:

• Congress didn’t pass the SAVE America Act, which would require voters to prove their citizenship. 
• The U.S. Supreme Court blocked the U.S. Postal Service from imposing new rules on mail ballots. 
• The Justice Department has lost more than two dozen lawsuits seeking to force states to turn over sensitive voter data. 
• A DOJ push to prosecute noncitizen voters has led to only a few dozen prosecutions, reflecting studies that consistently found that noncitizen voting happens extremely rarely. In the most recent action, U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche in late September announced indictments against 10 noncitizens over allegations of unlawfully voting.

The White House did secure a recent victory when the Supreme Court allowed states to use a supercharged version of a Homeland Security computer program that can identify possible noncitizen voters. But the decision will have minimal impact on the midterms because, under federal law, it’s too close to Election Day for most states to purge large numbers of voters off their rolls.

In response to questions from States Newsroom, White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis in a statement accused “extreme liberal Democrats” of preventing Americans from having full confidence in their elections by not supporting the SAVE America Act, though the legislation faced bipartisan opposition in the Senate. 

“President Trump is absolutely right: we fix this now, or we lose our country,” Bis said.

ICE at the polls?

Trump’s failure to advance his signature election-related policies has left him with few options to exert control outside of increasingly audacious and potentially illegal options. So when Mullin said that ICE can execute warrants at polling sites, the remarks provoked a swift backlash from voting rights activists and Democrats.

“The only reason why we would be at polling places is if there is a threat to that polling place or we’re serving a warrant on someone that we have been actively tracking down,” Mullin said during a news conference on Sept. 1.

On Friday, Homeland Security sent an unsigned statement to States Newsroom denying any plans to target polling locations, adding that Mullin has answered the question “dozens of times.” 

DHS said ICE agents are part of trained special response teams that can rapidly respond to major incidents if necessary to aid local law enforcement, regardless of location.

“Any ‘anxiety’ among election officials is the unfortunate result of fake news reports of ‘federal interference’ despite the Secretary’s numerous clear statements to the contrary,” the DHS statement said.

Notably, the statement does not address Mullin’s remark about serving warrants.

At least three lawsuits seek to block any possible deployment of federal agents to election sites. The oldest case, filed on Sept. 10 by Denver and several voting rights groups, points to Mullin’s comments and alleges ICE has already conducted law enforcement operations at polling places this year.

ICE agents “swarmed” a parking lot of an active polling site in San Antonio in May to detain someone, the suit says. In June, agents visited a Ventura County, California, polling place and accosted an election worker at a Syracuse, New York, polling place, it says.

Preparing for the worst

Tina Barton co-chairs the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections, a nonprofit group that helps elections and officials and law enforcement think through how to protect election workers and voters from violence, threats and intimidation. She said the organization has about 138 events on its calendar this year, compared to 67 in 2024.

In communities with concerns about a possible federal presence, the organization has officials work through a scenario involving ICE activity near a polling place that affects voters coming to the area, allowing local leaders to think through questions about what their legal options would be, how they would respond and what they would tell the public.

“Their conversation and how they choose to move forward, that’s owned by them and their community and how they choose to handle that. What we encourage is relationship-building ahead of time with them, conversations ahead of time,” Barton said.

Local election officials receive an “incredible” amount of training in how to handle crises, said Kamryn Hoadley, who advises Michigan election officials for Keep Our Republic, a pro-democracy nonprofit. “They are truly as prepared as somebody could be for anything that will happen on Election Day,” Hoadley said.

In Los Angeles County — the most populous county in the country, with more than 10 million residents — election officials have studied the potential for disruptions to the election. 

But Dean Logan, the Los Angeles registrar-recorder/county clerk, emphasized in a statement that scenarios concerning federal agents at polling sites and the seizure of ballots haven’t occurred in his area and haven’t been upheld in court.

“We’ve engaged in scenario and tabletop planning with our partners so that if an unexpected situation arises, roles are clear and our response is calm, coordinated, and focused on voter access and participation, rather than politically reactive,” Logan said. 

“Voters should know the behind-the-scenes work is thorough, and the fundamentals of a secure election are sound,” he said.

Democratic and Republican governors say they will more aggressively push back on federal overreach regardless of which party controls Washington.

Earlier this month, the bipartisan National Governors Association for the first time in over a decade updated its internal principles on federalism — the system of power sharing between Washington, D.C., and the states. That document now says governors must defend state sovereignty, including through public criticism of federal overreach, legal challenges to federal action, and declining to use state resources to enforce federal laws. 

The new policy comes as more state leaders during President Donald Trump’s second term elevate the importance of federalism, the uniquely American structure created by the framers of the Constitution.

The National Governors Association’s new policy calls for the federal government to respect the constitutional balance of power on pressing issues such as artificial intelligence, election administration and immigration — all of which have sparked state-federal conflicts under Trump’s presidency. And it takes aim at deployment of the National Guard after Trump last year moved to send troops into Democratic-leaning cities he characterized as crime-ridden, sparking major concerns about state sovereignty.

The new policy says the president should seek the consent of governors before deploying National Guard members and says such action should be limited to instances when federal resources are insufficient.

“Additionally, absent rare and extraordinary circumstances, the President should not deploy or transition a State’s National Guard from one state to another without the consent of both the sending and receiving states’ Governors,” the policy states.

Governors say they must resist federal overreach under Democratic and Republican presidents.

“I think it’s just a real test of how much you believe in federalism or not when your team is in power,” said Vermont Republican Gov. Phil Scott, who worked on reshaping NGA’s federalism policy for months, along with the governors of Maryland, North Carolina and Oklahoma. 

He said governors of both parties have been increasingly interested in issues of federalism since Trump’s deployment of troops last year. A GOP leader of a politically liberal state, Scott publicly criticized the president’s deployments last year and defended the Democratic governor of Illinois. 

While he said tension over troops has largely subsided, he said he expects governors will remain vigilant about power sharing between Washington and the states. 

“Republican and Democratic governors won’t agree on every policy and shouldn’t, but we should all agree that the constitutional balance of power really does matter,” Scott said. “I think that there will be more attention paid to this and continue to push forward on this because again, it doesn’t matter whether it’s the Trump administration, or a future administration of the other party, it’s doing what’s right for our states.”

Governors say states must be allowed to experiment on programs, compete with each other and pursue sometimes divergent policies. 

“It’s the best way to ensure that you really get locally driven solutions to problems, which creates a laboratory of democracy, laboratory of ideas, of innovation,” said North Carolina Democratic Gov. Josh Stein. “And it’s a way of ensuring that too much power doesn’t aggregate in any one person or body because it’s spread out among the 50 states and the federal government.”

Stein said governors across the political spectrum largely agreed on issues of federalism, which were studied by a dedicated working group and later approved by the organization’s executive committee. He credited his Republican colleagues for speaking out about issues of federal overreach while their party controls Washington.

“I’ve got all kinds of respect for them and their willingness to do that because I know that it’s not the easiest thing to do in these inflamed times,” he said. “I’ve only been in the job for a year and a half, and I haven’t had a Democratic president, so I hope that I would have as much principle as what I’ve witnessed out of a number of Republican governors.”

Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org.

President Donald Trump knows the midterm elections are shaping up to go poorly for him and the Republican party so he’s trying to cast as much doubt about the country’s election systems as possible, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin said at an event Monday morning. 

Meeting with three Madison-area election officials, Baldwin noted that Trump made 107 false claims about the results of the 2020 election in the six months from December 2025 to May of this year while taking a number of actions to restrict voting or discredit election systems ahead of the November election. 

The U.S. Supreme Court recently struck down Trump’s proposed executive order to limit the ability of the U.S. Postal Service to process absentee ballots sent through the mail. His administration has, at various times, promised to send ICE agents, National Guard troops, FBI agents and other federal law enforcement to polling places on Election Day — an action that opponents see as an effort to intimidate Democratic voters. He advocated strongly for the passage of a bill that would institute strict national voter ID requirements. 

Trump’s Departments of Justice and Homeland Security have been working since he was inaugurated last year to build a national database of registered voters. The effort by the DOJ to obtain Wisconsin’s voter rolls was halted in May by a federal judge. DHS is now working to compile a federal voter registration list for ICE to use to search for non-citizens who are registered to vote. 

“With everything so unaffordable, so expensive, the Trump administration should be focused on that,” Baldwin said. “But instead, I think, they are worried that they’re going to be held accountable for things this election, and so they’re selling conspiracy theories. The president has a history of election denialism, and so instead of focusing on lowering costs, he’s focusing on undercutting the midterm elections.”

At the meeting in the city county building in Madison, Baldwin met with Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, Sun Prairie City Clerk Elena Hilby and Waunakee Village Clerk Karla Endres. McDonell is an elected Democrat while the other two serve as non-partisan officials. 

The three election officials outlined the ways in which Wisconsin’s election systems are built to be resilient and transparent. 

In the years since the 2020 presidential election, a subset of Wisconsin’s electorate has remained skeptical of the state’s election system — repeatedly making false claims that fraud has stolen victories from their preferred candidates. 

McDonell said Monday that every step of the process is done in public, from the pre-election tests of the voting equipment to the voting itself and the counting process. Election officials, he said, try to plan for anything that could go wrong so if it does, they’re able to respond and get ballots counted. 

“We assume failure at every point along the way, and so we’re checking to make sure everything’s accurate as we go along,” he said. 

The three clerks said that in the remaining weeks before the election, they’re working on their emergency response plans in the event that Trump does send armed agents to the polls. Last week, U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the Republican candidate for governor, celebrated the Trump administration planning to send DOJ staff to the polls. 

Hilby said that she wants the people working the polls in Sun Prairie to know what to do if federal agents show up, balancing the need to follow the law against the risk that poll workers could be put in danger. 

“An armed federal agent is illegal to have at the polling place,” Hilby said. “I wouldn’t want my election officials confronting them, but more approach them and say, you know, ‘what are you here for? Do you have a warrant?’ Get whatever information they can, so they can contact me, so I can immediately contact my city attorney, and I would probably be on the phone to [McDonell], so we knew how to respond. I don’t want to put them in danger. I also want to protect the election.” 

McDonell said it’s “frustrating” that local election officials are being forced to plan for this contingency and that he would like more concrete advice from the state elections commission. This year, the Wisconsin Elections Commission has issued a number of guidance documents to clerks about problems with the U.S. Postal Service, but remained silent on the question of federal agents at the polls. 

“It’s good to have some statewide advice on how to handle these situations, but it is tough,” he said. “We’ve been doing a lot of planning around these scenarios, making sure we have criminal defense attorneys, federal criminal defense attorneys, on retainer in case we have to rush to [federal court] to get an order. So a lot of planning is going on behind the scenes for different scenarios.”

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

It took mere minutes for conspiracy theorists to seize on a Milwaukee election error after the August primary, when officials initially forgot to extract election results from five of the city’s nine absentee ballot tabulators. They lobbed baseless accusations that election officials had switched votes or otherwise tampered with the results.

But audit logs from those five tabulators show no evidence of tampering between the time officials initially left the facility and returned again to correctly extract results, experts told Votebeat.

“I don’t see a ‘there’ there,” said Duncan Buell, a chair emeritus of computer science and engineering at the University of South Carolina who has been analyzing election data and voting systems since 2010.

Ryan Macias, an election consultant who previously worked for the arm of the Election Assistance Commission that certifies voting machines, agreed there were “no signs or evidence that anything was done outside the norm” between the initial error and the successful extraction of the results.

More than three weeks after the primary election, city officials released audit logs from all nine tabulators to the Wisconsin Elections Commission and the public on Sept. 4. The files detail every action on the nine Milwaukee tabulators used to count absentee ballots for the Aug. 11 election.

On each of the five affected tabulators, the logs tell the same story: Officials mistakenly selected “export audit log” instead of “export files” during the initial extraction, which happened between 10:15 p.m. and about 10:40 p.m. Then, officials locked the machines.

Officials began turning the machines back on at around 11:30 p.m., after they realized they had made a mistake. They extracted the correct files shortly after midnight. The audit logs show no ballots being scanned, votes being deleted, or that the data contained on the tabulators was manipulated in any way.

The error didn’t change the vote count at all. It just delayed election results by a couple hours.

When Macias first learned of the issue, he assumed that the problem was human error and would be resolved.

“Now, looking at the audit log, I can tell you with a 100% fact that what I assumed happened [is what] happened,” he said.

Other experts agreed.

Jennifer Morrell, CEO of The Elections Group, said she reviewed the audit logs with her team of experienced election experts.

“From what I see, those logs match the public account exactly,” she said.

“In the roughly two hours between those two exports, there’s no scanning or counting activity recorded in the logs on any of those five machines,” she said. “And just as importantly, the ballot counts on every machine match the officially reported.”

Conspiracy theories percolated well before Milwaukee released audit logs

Conspiracy theories about what may have transpired in Milwaukee on Election Day began circulating almost immediately after Milwaukee officials announced the mistake. Popular social media accounts questioned the credibility of election officials and others suggested that officials were directly involved in fraud.

Three days after the election, Votebeat requested the audit logs — the records that could show exactly what happened on the tabulators during the period conspiracy theorists were questioning. Milwaukee did not release them until Sept. 4, more than three weeks later, and after the Wisconsin Elections Commission also asked the city to make them public.

Experts said that delay was not unusual.

“Releasing audit logs — these machine logs — that’s not a typical part of the documentation that election offices normally produce,” Morrell said, adding that it’s likely that Milwaukee would have needed legal approval before releasing the logs. “The fact that they did make them public, I think that’s a responsible process — not a cover up.”

More important, she said, is that the officials retained the records in the first place.

“The fact that the log is there, the fact that these things are recorded should be seen as a positive even though it was slow for them,” she said. “I think the more concerning thing would be if the log just didn’t exist at all.”

Milwaukee plans better documentation for the future

In response to the error, Milwaukee election chief Paulina Gutiérrez outlined several changes meant to prevent similar problems.

Written instructions for extracting results will now include images showing election officials which options to select on screen, Gutiérrez said in a letter to the Wisconsin Elections Commission. Those instructions will also be made available to observers at the city’s absentee ballot facility.

Before the results are downloaded, she said, the extraction teams will be briefed on the process. As workers move through the steps, they will verbally identify each selection they make so other members of the team can confirm they have followed the correct procedure.

“In this instance, an error occurred during the results-download process,” she told the commission. “At the same time, the safeguards surrounding the election worked as intended: the discrepancy was identified, the underlying election results remained intact, the correct files were retrieved, and Milwaukee’s accurate election results were ultimately reported.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

The hotly contested U.S. Postal Service rule restricting mail-in voting usurps Congress’ authority, as well as states’ power to administer elections, more than 250 current and former members of Congress said in a filing to the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday.

All 47 members of the U.S. Senate Democratic Caucus, 199 current House Democrats and 15 former House Republicans signed the friend-of-the-court brief opposing President Donald Trump’s policy to add several requirements to mail ballots. 

The U.S. Constitution “is unambiguous” in empowering states to run elections, while Congress can enact laws to oversee elections generally, they argued.

“Congress has passed several laws regulating federal elections—though it has always done so surgically, deliberately leaving the States with considerable room to maneuver,” they wrote.

The executive branch has no role, they said. 

The Trump administration has argued the rule, published last month, requires only “modest” technical specifications for mail ballots and that states transmit lists of eligible voters to receive the ballots. The rule is a targeted measure affecting mail delivery, not elections, the administration says.

But the lawmakers say that argument fails. 

The agency cannot take action related to elections without a congressional directive, they wrote. Congress never wrote a law asking for the requirements included in the USPS rule, they said. 

Executive order

In this case, Trump spurred the Postal Service to write the rule in a March executive order, based on the unsubstantiated premise that vote-by-mail is vulnerable to fraud. 

That shows the rule is meant to address Trump’s concerns about election administration, not mail specifications, the lawmakers said.

“The integrity of our constitutional system depends on each branch keeping to its assigned role,” they wrote. “The Framers set up a two-part system that gave States default authority to regulate federal elections subject to Congress’s authority to override the States. The Framers did not provide the President with any authority to interfere in that system, nor has Congress imbued the Executive Branch with any such authority by statute.”

Spokespeople for the White House, USPS and the Department of Justice, which is representing the Trump administration in the case, did not immediately return messages seeking comment Tuesday.

In a separate brief, the legal advocacy group the Society for the Rule of Law made a similar argument, saying the federal postal law the administration has cited provides only broad language that does not empower the agency to regulate election mail.

“The non-election, boilerplate … provisions on which Applicants rely are not a secret, alternative way for the USPS to bar ballot mail, conditionally or otherwise, on the eve of election day,” the group wrote. “Under the federalism presumption and the major question doctrine, the USPS needed a clear statement of statutory authority.”

Rushed delivery

The rule would require technical elements such as unique barcodes on ballot envelopes. Elections experts say those requirements are unworkable in time for the fall’s midterm elections because states have already designed, printed and — in some cases — begun sending ballots.

The rule would also require states to send to the federal government lists of eligible voters, which would be checked against a Department of Homeland Security database to verify citizenship. 

The rule bans the Postal Service from delivering ballots to registered voters who are not verified through that method.

The online portal that the rule says states should use for this process has still, less than two months until Election Day, not been introduced to states. A whistleblower last week reported the rushed development has led to myriad problems with the tool, which could result in legitimate ballots being rejected.

Opponents, including more than 20 Democratic state officials and voting rights groups that sued to challenge the rule, say it would risk disenfranchisement for the millions of voters, including Trump, who vote by mail.

High court ruling pending

The rule has been the subject of rapidfire legal fighting over the past several weeks, and the Supreme Court is now weighing whether to overturn a Massachusetts federal judge’s order pausing the rule while litigation continues, after the Trump administration filed an appeal over the weekend.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Sunday asked the states and voting rights groups challenging the rule to file their response to the application by Wednesday at 4 p.m. Eastern.

That district court injunction from Judge Indira Talwani, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, held that the rule was likely unconstitutional and unlawful for reasons the members of Congress articulated Tuesday: The Constitution grants states and Congress the power to oversee elections and states would be harmed if they are forced to comply with the regulation before courts can determine its legality.

A U.S. Postal Service rule restricting mail-in voting, like the executive order from President Donald Trump that spurred it, is unconstitutional, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani said in a Friday order extending a freeze on the policy.

The Trump administration quickly appealed the order to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday.

Then Sunday, the administration also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the preliminary injunction, saying Talwani rushed it without considering the actual text of its final rule.

“The district court’s continuing prejudgment of the rule is baseless, and an immediate stay is warranted,” U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in a Sunday application to the court.

Sauer described the rule as containing “only modest envelope-design and addressee-information requirements for federal-election ballots sent via U.S. Mail.” He added that USPS had long recommended the design requirements it was seeking to codify in the rule.

The Supreme Court will consider the application on its emergency docket. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Sunday asked the states and voting rights groups challenging the rule to file their response to the application by Wednesday. It’s unclear when a ruling would come.

Friday injunction

Talwani, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, issued a preliminary injunction late Friday, 60 days before Election Day, blocking the U.S. Postal Service rule from going into effect while court challenges play out. The injunction converts a 14-day pause she ordered a week prior.

The Massachusetts federal judge voiced several serious concerns about the policy, including that it infringes on states’ constitutional power to administer elections and Congress’ power to legislate election policy.

The rule, which the Postal Service published last month based on a Trump executive order in March, would disenfranchise voters who depend on mail voting, give states the impossible task of overhauling their election systems ahead of a fast-approaching election and assert power the agency does not have under the U.S. Constitution, Talwani said.

Not an election regulation, USPS says

The administration and a handful of GOP state attorneys general have defended the rule as regulating mail, not elections. 

A statement from U.S. Postmaster General David Steiner restated the claim earlier Friday.

The portions of the rule establishing technical standards for ballot envelopes were based on longstanding best practices and were not “breaking new and uncharted ground,” Steiner wrote.

Similarly, a more controversial provision requiring states to send the Postal Service a list of eligible voters was also not complicated for the agency, he said, noting that USPS would not amend the lists.

“The USPS does not edit, change, review or question the contents of the list—the list is merely a list of voters that a State says are receiving a ballot through the mail,” he wrote. “So basically, the State provided list is a manifest identifying the recipients of ballot mail.”

Clash with law passed by Congress

Talwani said Friday the federal government’s denial that the rule is an election regulation “rings hollow.” 

“Throughout its body of election legislation, Congress has never delegated its Elections Clause power to the USPS,” she wrote. “Unauthorized by the Elections Clause, the Final Rule clashes with Congress’s statutory scheme, and is unconstitutional where it intrudes not only on Congress’s Elections Clause powers but also that power left to the States.”

In addition to the constitutional principles the rule violates, it is unworkable ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections that will determine control of Congress, she said. 

All states allow some form of mail-in voting. The first ballots were sent Friday, with North Carolina starting to mail ballots to certain voters. 

Sauer noted that ballots had begun to “enter the mailstream,” with more states set to send ballots in the coming weeks.

That added urgency for justices to act, he said. If courts eventually allow the rule to take effect and states have not taken action to comply, it could threaten voters’ ability to cast mail ballots in those states, he said.

“There is a grave risk that States may not have taken the necessary steps to comply, due to the false sense of latitude created by the court’s improper injunction, potentially depriving those States’ citizens of the ability to vote by mail,” he wrote.

In a statement, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, one of the Democratic attorneys general who sued to block the rule, said Talwani’s order would keep the commonwealth’s election administration on track.

“This order protects our ability to effectively deliver mail ballots to all residents relying on them to make their voices heard in the November election,” she said. “Voters should continue to vote-by-mail as usual and know that this system is safe and secure.”