The Post Office Is Not the Nation's Election Office

A federal judge in Washington has stopped the United States Postal Service from implementing its new rule for federal ballot mail, just weeks before the midterm elections. The September 13 preliminary injunction in three consolidated cases blocks the rule in its entirety. It is a preliminary decision, not a final ruling on the merits, but it restores the operating rules that states had been using before the agency tried to rewrite them.

The rule was presented as a technical upgrade. It required new envelope designs, voter-specific barcodes and a Postal Service review. It also created a Federal Ballot Mail Portal through which state and local officials would have had to submit each mail voter's name, address and barcode information. Postal staff would then verify outgoing ballot mail and could return pieces that did not match the new federal records.

Judge Carl Nichols found that the challengers were likely to show that the Postal Service had acted beyond its legal authority. The opinion says the Postal Reorganization Act gives the agency power over the collection, handling, transport and delivery of mail, not the power to impose new election procedures on state officials, build a voter-data system or refuse lawful mail because it is absent from that system. In the court's preliminary formulation, those parts of the rule exceed ‘any conception of the outer bounds’ of the agency's authority.

The timing made the risk more than theoretical. The rule took effect on August 21, less than two months before the election, while North Carolina was already scheduled to begin mailing ballots on September 4. The court said more than 50 million pieces of federal ballot mail could move through the system this cycle. Election offices would have had to redesign or reprint envelopes, secure Postal Service review and prepare a new portal while voters were already entering the process.

This is the constructive point: a delivery agency should be excellent at delivery, and election rules should be made by Congress and the states in the open. Uniform envelope standards may be sensible when they improve sorting or tracking. A federal enrolment list that becomes a condition of sending a ballot is different. It changes who controls the gateway to a vote, using an administrative rule where legislation and state election law should do the work.

The Supreme Court is already considering a separate challenge to the same Postal Service rule. That means the injunction may not be the last word. It is, however, a useful institutional boundary: modernising the mail is not the same thing as acquiring the power to decide which election mail is allowed to move.