(Dobbs) “We really want to have election integrity.... decided by U.S.P.S.?”
“The Postal Service must stick to its job of delivering the mail, rather than trying to decide who gets to vote.”
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Will they or won’t they?
That’s what the fierce battle over mail-in ballots has come down to: will the United States Supreme Court heed the sound arguments of a federal judge in Boston, whose simple question last week to an advocate for President Trump’s plan to use the United States Postal Service to restrict the ballots was, “We really want to have election integrity in our state decided by U.S.P.S.?” Or will this Supreme Court, dominated by right-wingers, throw sound reasoning to the wind?
We’ll find out soon, because yesterday the president’s solicitor general filed an emergency application with the Court, asking the justices to allow Trump’s proposal to proceed. It would let the Postal Service play a subjective and conclusive role in deciding who gets to vote and who doesn’t in the upcoming November elections. Election officials would have to deliver digital lists of their mail-in voters to the USPS, and would have to print special barcodes on the envelopes to track every one.
I’d like to believe that with the integrity of our elections at stake, and with the threat of what the judge called the “disenfranchisement of millions of United States citizens who seek to vote by mail,” we can trust the justices to follow the explicit requirements of the law, of the Constitution. But they already poured kerosene this past April on the Voting Rights Act, which for 60 years has helped ensure the cherished principle of “one man one vote.” In that and other cases where President Trump had an interest, the Court has long since abandoned sound thinking. So I wouldn’t bet big money that they’ll come down on the side of the American people.
The issue is, what rules can Trump impose and what role can the Postal Service play when it comes to mail-in ballots, which about a third of all voters used in the last presidential election (and which Trump uses regularly to vote himself)? He wants to make them harder to get and harder to use, because statistics show that more Democrats vote with mail-in ballots than Republicans. So against all evidence, Trump claims they are subject to massive fraud. Then again, he claims he won the 2020 election, so we know how credible his bogus claims are.
But can he impose his will on the elections? That’s what the Court is now asked to decide.
The language of the Constitution, in Article I, Section 4, is clear:
“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing (sic) Senators.”
Note what is missing: any mention of a president’s role in regulating our elections. You won’t find it in Article I, or any other part of our nation’s defining document.
But this president doesn’t care. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say, he cares a lot because if the midterms go against him and his party, he faces big blockades to his agenda for the second half of his term, the nullification of some of what he already has pushed through, and even impeachment by a Democratic congress.
The judge in Boston was blunt: the administration’s hurried effort to put the Postal Service in charge of who gets mail-in ballots and who doesn’t, and what size and shape and form they take, “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.”
Colorado’s secretary of state, one of the litigants to stop Trump, summarized it in a nutshell: “The Postal Service must stick to its job of delivering the mail, rather than trying to decide who gets to vote.”
This is not a controversy over which the Supreme Court can linger. The day we go to the ballot box is only eight weeks from tomorrow. But the day mail-in ballots get sent to voters in some states, including swing states like Wisconsin and North Carolina, already has passed.
In other states, they’re already in the pipeline. The attorney general of North Carolina put out a statement that said if the Court rules in favor of Trump, “That would throw our election into chaos. The ballots are printed, the process is underway, and North Carolinians deserve a lawful and orderly election.” The chief programs officer at the National Association of Election Officials said in a court filing that changing and regulating ballots for an election only eight weeks away is “effectively impossible.” A member of Wisconsin’s elections commission put it this way: “If you can’t even get the ballots out, people can’t vote.”
The political forces trying to stop the president ironically are employing the reasoning he actually used when fighting to keep building his ballroom at the White House: “Too much already has been done, it’s too impractical to stop and replace the old rules with new ones.”
There’s another wrinkle: a whistle-blower from the Postal Service itself.
According to a letter from Senator Richard Blumenthal to the Postmaster General, who is nominated by a Trump-appointed board, “USPS’s effort (to conform with the president’s plan) has been ‘rushed,’ ‘risky and haphazard’ because leadership has demanded an impossible timeframe. In an effort to meet impossible deadlines, USPS has eliminated standard and needed testing, thereby creating substantial risk of a ‘catastrophic failure’ of the system that could ‘derail the midterm elections.’”
The bottom line to that “catastrophic failure” could be that tens of thousands of ballots in bulk-mailing batches could be rejected if “even one bar code on one single ballot” didn’t scan properly.
In the federal court in Boston, the president’s solicitor general compared the proposed rule to let the USPS discriminate with mail-in ballots to “preparation requirements for the mailing of cremated remains and replica explosives.”
That’s a good one. I hope he floats that one at the Supreme Court too. As I asked at the beginning, will the Court heed the sound arguments of a federal judge in Boston who foresees “the disenfranchisement of millions,” or, to please the president, will it take cover in claptrap arguments comparing mail-in ballots to cremated remains?
In the past, mail-in ballots have worked. Allegations of fraud repeatedly have been debunked. Left alone, they do not threaten our right to vote. That changes if the Postal Service gets involved. But as Arizona’s secretary of state told an interviewer, “The greatest threat to American elections is Donald Trump lying about them.”
© 2026 Greg Dobbs