Federal officials charged a Utah letter carrier Tuesday with throwing 300 primary ballots in a church parking lot dumpster, an incident that a top U.S. Justice Department official said made the case for stricter regulations of voting.

The prosecution of Damon Matai Seei, of Payson, Utah, showed “voting fraud is real,” acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said at a press conference at DOJ headquarters in Washington.

The Justice Department gave the arrest an unusually high profile, spotlighting the administration’s efforts to combat voter fraud after the U.S. Supreme Court this month blocked a new U.S. Postal Service rule limiting mail voting from going into effect for this year’s elections.

The regulation was meant to “address the chronically abused mail-in ballot system,” McCotter said. He criticized the trial judge who initially blocked the rule, which would have required special tracking and design features, among other things such as creating a national database of eligible voters.

“Election integrity should not be a political or partisan issue,” McCotter said. “Who could be against properly tracking mail-in ballots? Unfortunately, but entirely predictably, that regulation was blocked by a judge in Massachusetts. … The Trump administration, however, will continue taking aggressive actions to protect our elections.”

Postal Service rule

U.S. District Judge Indiria Talwani’s order blocking the rule is only in effect for the Nov. 3 elections, a provision meant to preserve the status quo because the rule was finalized mere months before the midterms. The merits of the case are still being argued. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Talwani’s decision.

The prosecution of Seei, and the attention the administration sought to give it, undercut a key argument the administration made in the case: The rule included only “modest” technical specifications for a category of mail and should not be interpreted as an election regulation.

The U.S. Constitution grants states the authority to administer elections, with policy oversight from Congress. 

In siding with the Democratic states and voting rights groups who filed suit, Talwani and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit said the rule was clearly an attempt to affect election policy and was not restricted to a modest mail regulation.

Trump and mail-in voting

President Donald Trump has railed against mail-in voting and claimed, without evidence, that it is a major source of election fraud and contributed to his 2020 loss to President Joe Biden.

Since Trump retook office in January 2025, the department has charged 70 immigrants with illegally voting, compared with only 13 in the four years of Biden’s term, McCotter said Tuesday.

“And we intend to bring many more,” he added.

Homeland Security Investigations, a Homeland Security Department agency, has made 160 recent arrests, from 1,600 open voter fraud cases, HSI acting Deputy Executive Associate Director Matthew Millhollin said.

A reporter in the room noted that 70 prosecutions amounted to a bare fraction of the 150 million votes cast in the 2024 election.

McCotter responded that the Utah case involved 300 ballots, and that law enforcement had only scratched the surface of possible incidents. “Thousands more” cases were being investigated, he said.

“The folks on the other side, the opponents of the president, insist this has never happened, that there is no voting fraud,” he said. “And so when we have dozens of cases … I think that discourages and defeats their characterization.”

No partisan motive alleged

Seei, who is no longer a postal worker, intentionally threw out about 300 mail ballots on June 3 that were being mailed to voters in advance of the June 23 primary in Utah, according to charging documents.

In an interview with law enforcement, he indicated he did not have a political motive but said he threw away the mail, which also included advertisements, “because he wanted to ‘lighten his workload’ so he could presumably go home earlier,” prosecutors said.

Melissa Holyoak, the top federal prosecutor for Utah, traveled to Washington, D.C., for Tuesday’s press conference. She noted that 95% of the state’s voters cast their ballots by mail.

Many people in Seei’s delivery area in Eagle Mountain, Utah, complained to the Utah County Clerk that they hadn’t received ballots, Holyoak said. Using county databases, the clerk found that voter participation was “remarkably low” in the area where complaints originated.

“As American citizens, we have certain freedoms and rights,” Holyoak said. “And one of those fundamental rights is the right to vote. But when defendant allegedly tossed the mail-in ballots into a parking lot dumpster, those citizens’ right to vote were also thrown away.”

The federal public defender representing Seei did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

A federal judge froze for two weeks a Trump administration regulation to restrict mail voting late Thursday, calling the U.S. Postal Service rule a violation of states’ power to administer elections.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani’s temporary restraining order reinstated a pause that she had lifted just a day earlier, following a U.S. Supreme Court procedural ruling Monday that allowed the administration to implement the policy. The federal government will likely appeal Thursday night’s order.

Throughout months of litigation, Talwani, whom President Barack Obama appointed to the Massachusetts federal court bench in 2013, has shown strong skepticism about President Donald Trump’s power to compel states to overhaul their mail voting systems.

She did so again Thursday, saying the government had not produced any evidence of fraudulent mail voting that the rule was intended to fix. The voting rights groups and Democratic states that sued, however, had shown that voters would be disenfranchised in the Nov. 3 midterm elections if the rule remains in place then, she wrote.

“The USPS’s interest in correcting an unsubstantiated problem through likely unconstitutional means is dwarfed by the overwhelming risk of pervasive disenfranchisement of citizens who need access to mail ballots in order to vote,” Talwani said.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled Monday the two dozen Democratic state officials had sued too early when they challenged Trump’s executive order that USPS had not yet codified in a final rule. The ruling did not mention that the Postal Service had actually published a final rule the previous business day, Aug. 21.

The states and voting rights groups promptly refiled lawsuits Wednesday to challenge the final rule, asking Talwani to keep it from taking effect while the case proceeded.

In the interim, the Trump administration forged ahead with the rule’s implementation, publishing an FAQ earlier Thursday on various aspects of the rule and arguing in court that it was not seeking to take over election administration.

The rule creates new requirements for mail ballot envelopes, which states say would present a major challenge to complete before this year’s elections.

It also requires states to send the federal government lists of voting-age citizens, which would be cross-referenced with federal citizenship data, and forbids the Postal Service from delivering or collecting ballots from people who are not confirmed to be eligible voters through that process.

Trump and administration officials have characterized the rule as a tool for election integrity and Trump has long claimed fraud was rampant in mail voting, without ever providing evidence.

All states allow some form of mail voting. Eight states, primarily in the West, and the District of Columbia, mail ballots to every registered voter.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Postal Service took another step Thursday in implementing a Trump administration policy to restrict mail-in voting, even as a high-stakes legal battle plays out and midterm elections approach.

The agency published an FAQ about its new rule that compels states to send their voter rolls to the federal government and only deliver mail ballots to voters who match federal citizenship data. The rule also updates standards for mail ballots that states have said would be difficult to implement before the Nov. 3 elections that will determine the balance of Congress.

The controversial rule, which two dozen Democratic states and voting rights groups are challenging in federal court, increases the federal government’s role in elections and voting. 

The states have argued the rule violates the U.S. Constitution, which grants them the power of administering elections.

In a Thursday brief defending the rule, the U.S. Justice Department said it only contained “modest improvements and modernizations of the Postal Service’s infrastructure” and would have minimal effect on states’ election administration.

“The Rule does not displace a single State election law,” the brief said. “And it need not and should not prevent a single voter from voting by mail.”

Democrat-led states and voting rights groups re-filed lawsuits Wednesday to block the Trump administration from executing the rule after a Supreme Court ruling Monday that temporarily greenlit the policy on procedural grounds.

USPS acknowledged pending litigation in the FAQ, and noted it would make any changes spurred by the suits. 

Republicans, including Trump, have long made the accusation that noncitizens vote in federal elections, which multiple studies have shown occurs rarely.   

On Thursday, Trump said he believed states could implement the new rule, even in North Carolina where ballots are set to be mailed next week.  

“North Carolina is great,” Trump said. “And they do some mail-in ballots. But basically they ruled on the legitimacy and the way we want to make them legitimate. And it was a great ruling for the Republicans.”

Those states suing to block the rule are California, Massachusetts, Nevada, Washington, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, as well as the District of Columbia.

Jennifer Shutt contributed to this story.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday handed a procedural victory to President Donald Trump on an executive order to curb mail-in voting, but the administration is still fighting a separate ruling that limits a portion of the order and remains in effect — complicating the administration’s temporary win. 

In light of the ruling in the nation’s highest court, the administration late Monday asked U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Massachusetts to vacate her decision from earlier in August that blocks the U.S. Postal Service from carrying out aspects of Trump’s executive order, while the voting rights groups that brought that challenge argued Tuesday the block should remain in place.

Monday’s decision from the Supreme Court also drew the ire of Democrats, who argued that Trump’s executive order ran afoul of the Constitution and threatens democracy. 

Under the Constitution, states are responsible for administering elections. Many Democrats have said Trump’s order seeks to unlawfully grab that power for the executive branch.

The Supreme Court’s ruling halted a June decision from Talwani in a case brought by more than 20 Democratic-led states and Washington, D.C. 

But that ruling does not apply in a separate case, filed in the same Massachusetts federal court, by the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts and several other voting rights groups challenging Trump’s executive order. 

In its emergency motion in the voting rights groups case, the administration wrote that “the Supreme Court’s order leaves no room for any further dispute: this Court lacked jurisdiction to issue the preliminary-injunction in this case, just as it lacked jurisdiction to enter summary judgment in the (states’) case, because there is no justiciable controversy over a proposed rule until it is actually finalized by an agency.”  

Final rule published

Further complicating the matter, the U.S. Postal Service on Friday issued a final rule that details how the agency would execute Trump’s order. 

The voting rights groups on Saturday asked Talwani to enforce her August order as a result of the Postal Service issuing the regulation. 

Regarding that request, Talwani on Tuesday afternoon said the rule violated her order because she specifically said the administration could not take steps to implement the executive order. However, she declined to take action “other than identifying the violation.”

The groups redoubled their request earlier Tuesday, writing that the Supreme Court’s decision was based on the lack of a USPS final rule.

“That decision addressed a materially different record and did not consider the critical development that occurred last Friday: The USPS Defendants promulgated a Final Rule, transforming the posture of this case and supplying a final agency action that was not before the Supreme Court,” they wrote.

Talwani’s order on the administration’s request was still pending Tuesday afternoon.

Democratic blowback

Meanwhile, Democrats were quick to blast the Supreme Court’s decision, including the top Democrats in the U.S. Senate and House. 

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said it’s “a disgrace that the highest court in the nation is allowing Trump to put a dagger into the heart of our democracy,” in a Monday statement. 

The New York Democrat noted that “Trump’s effort to turn the Postal Service into a voter suppression machine is blatantly unconstitutional – yet his MAGA Supreme Court is refusing to stop it from going forward,” while adding that “Senate Democrats will fight every attempt to hijack mail-in voting and rig the rules before voters have their say this November.” 

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries also blasted the decision and vowed to continue fighting, saying “the sycophantic Supreme Court majority’s decision in the vote-by-mail case is sowing chaos in service to Donald Trump’s effort to undermine our free and fair elections.” 

Jeffries, also of New York, added that “the Trump-aligned justices on the Supreme Court did not and cannot give the President the power to decide how states run elections or who gets to vote by mail.” 

The respective heads of the Democratic National Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Democratic Governors Association also pushed back against Trump’s executive order.  

“This is the latest attempt from Trump to rig the midterms because Republicans know their corrupt, cost-hiking policies are deeply unpopular and hurting people every day,” DNC Chair Ken Martin, DCCC Chair Suzan DelBene, DSCC Chair Kirsten Gillibrand, and DGA Chair Andy Beshear said in a statement.

“Democrats will not let them get away with it, and we are confident the American people will reject these Republican schemes in November,” they wrote. “We’re going to fight every day until Trump’s illegal executive order, and all of his other attempts to undermine our free and fair elections, are completely thrown out.” 

A spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the party’s U.S. House campaign arm, did not return a message Tuesday.