A USPS Rule Could Block 46 Million Mail Voters. The Comment Deadline Is July 2.

What the Rule Does

On June 2, 2026, the U.S. Postal Service published a proposed rule in the Federal Register implementing the March 31 executive order on mail voting. The rule has three requirements.

First, every state that uses mail ballots must submit lists of voters who will receive them, including names, addresses, and unique identifiers.

Second, every ballot envelope must carry a barcode matching the state-submitted list. USPS would design the barcode specifications.

Third, USPS could refuse to deliver any ballot envelope that does not match the approved list or does not carry the required barcode.

The public comment period closes July 2, 2026.

46 million Americans voted by mail in 2024. This rule would let an unelected federal agency decide which of those ballots get delivered.

Who Depends on Mail Voting

Nearly 60% of all 2024 voters cast ballots early or by mail. Eight states conduct elections primarily by mail: California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington. Over 85% of ballots in these states are mail ballots. The proposed rule would require every one of those states to rebuild their ballot systems around federal barcodes and federal lists.

36.8% of voters aged 65 and older voted by mail in 2024, the highest rate of any age group. 42.5 million American adults have a disability. Over half of adults aged 80+ have a disability. For these voters, mail voting is not a convenience. It is the only option.

6 million active-duty military, dependents, and overseas citizens are eligible to vote by mail under federal law. In 2008, 33% of military absentee ballots were never returned. Many never arrived. Adding a federal barcode gatekeeping layer makes that worse, not better.

24 states plus DC allow same-day or Election Day registration. The executive order’s 60-day list requirement would make late registration and late absentee ballot requests impossible in all of them.

The Toll Falls Unequally

549,824 mail ballots were rejected in 2022 — a 1.5% rejection rate. Non-matching signatures caused 28% of rejections. Non-white voters’ mail ballots are rejected at roughly twice the rate of white voters’. In Florida, young voters ages 18-25 face rejection rates of 4-5%. Voters over 60 are rejected at under 1%. The people most likely to lose their vote to a bureaucratic error are the people least likely to have a backup plan.

~119,000 ballots were not delivered within 7 days in the 2024 election. The proposed rule adds a new layer of federal gatekeeping on top of an already-fragile delivery system.

We know what happens when USPS is weaponized against mail voting. In the summer of 2020, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy removed 671 high-speed sorting machines across 49 states and banned overtime and extra delivery trips. On-time first-class mail delivery dropped from 92% to 69% by December.

Congress held emergency hearings. Courts issued injunctions. The damage to public trust lasted years.

The proposed rule gives USPS a more targeted tool. Instead of slowing all mail, it lets the agency refuse specific ballots that do not match a federal list, with no requirement to notify the voter.

The Cost Falls on Offices That Cannot Absorb It

The median annual budget for a local election office is $17,691. The proposed rule would impose $10,000 or more in new costs per jurisdiction for barcoded envelopes alone. For half of all election offices, that is more than half their total budget.

32% of election jurisdictions have no full-time staff dedicated to elections. 75% of small jurisdictions serving under 5,000 voters have one person running the entire operation. These offices face the same barcode compliance requirements as Los Angeles County.

90% of election offices have five or fewer staff total. No federal funding was provided for compliance. Rural counties may not have barcode-printing capability at all.

One election administration expert told Votebeat: “I haven’t seen much here that is giving me much confidence this can be done by the fall without creating a lot of confusion and potential chaos.”

States Are Already Fighting It

23 states plus DC have filed lawsuits challenging the underlying executive order. Five cases are pending in federal courts across the country.

On June 4, the NAACP filed a motion alleging the proposed rule violates a 2021 settlement requiring USPS to maintain election mail processing standards. That settlement arose from DeJoy’s service cuts before the 2020 election.

Senator Alex Padilla of California said the rule could prevent “tens of millions of eligible voters” from voting by mail.

The Problem This Claims to Solve Does Not Exist

Noncitizen voting accounts for 0.0003% of ballots cast. Fewer than 500 cases in 160 million voters. Oregon has voted entirely by mail since 2000 with a fraud rate below 0.0001%.

The Supreme Court has already gutted the Voting Rights Act in three decisions since 2013. Since Shelby County, 1,688 polling places have closed in formerly covered states. 123 restrictive voting laws have been enacted across 30 states since 2020. This proposed rule is one more instrument in that sequence.

The Pattern

This rule implements the executive order that a federal judge declined to block in May. It follows the same sequence: the SAVE Act would block 21 million citizens from registering. States are purging voter rolls using error-prone databases. 44 restrictive voting laws have been enacted in 2025-2026 alone.

Each measure narrows who can vote or how they can vote. Together, they reshape the electorate before a single ballot is cast.

The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore the preclearance protections that prevented exactly this kind of federal overreach. It has been introduced. It has not received a vote.

What you can do now

Submit a public comment opposing the proposed rule before the July 2 deadline. Email PCFederalRegister@usps.gov with the subject line “Ballot Mail.” State that you oppose any rule giving USPS the authority to refuse ballot delivery. Comments are part of the public record and agencies must respond to substantive objections.
Call both senators and ask them to oppose the USPS proposed rule on mail ballot voter lists. 46 million Americans voted by mail in 2024. Non-white voters’ ballots are already rejected at twice the rate. This rule adds a new layer of federal gatekeeping that falls hardest on voters who are already at a disadvantage.
Ask your senators to bring the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to a vote. The VRA’s preclearance system would have required federal review of exactly this kind of rule change before it could take effect. The Senate voted 98-0 to reauthorize the VRA in 2006. The bill has been reintroduced. It deserves a vote.
Contact your House representative and ask them to protect state authority over elections. States have administered mail voting safely for decades. Federal barcode mandates with no funding impose unfunded costs on counties that are already understaffed.
Share the comment deadline with three people. July 2 is less than a month away. Public comments carry legal weight in the rulemaking process. Use the letter below.

Update, June 17, 2026: Election attorney David Walbert, who argued a Voting Rights Act case before the Supreme Court in 1982, writes in the Guardian that the conservative justices are expected to rule soon that a mail ballot delivered to a post office by election day cannot be counted unless the Postal Service delivers it to an election board by that same deadline. That ruling, if issued, would extend the consequences of the USPS proposed rule described in this brief well beyond the comment period.

Walbert also describes the Trump administration as directing federal agencies to restrict mail-in voting before the 2026 midterms on the stated basis that more Democrats than Republicans vote by mail. The Justice Department is separately pushing for voter purges that Walbert says would remove a disproportionate share of qualified minority voters from the rolls.

The July 2 public comment deadline on the USPS rule has not changed. Walbert’s piece describes the current federal approach as the most coordinated effort to suppress mail voting he has seen in four decades of election litigation.

Update, June 23, 2026: The U.S. Supreme Court declined on June 23 to review an Arkansas law limiting who can assist voters at the polls, leaving intact a July 2025 ruling by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that individuals and private organizations cannot sue to enforce Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act. Section 208 grants voters with a disability or the inability to read or write the right to receive assistance from a person of their choice, a protection that overlaps with the mail-ballot populations identified in this brief.

MALDEF President and General Counsel Thomas A. Saenz said the ruling leaves no private voting rights enforcement in the 8th Circuit, covering Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Saenz attributed the enforcement gap to the current administration’s opposition to Voting Rights Act enforcement at the federal level.

A separate 8th Circuit case involving the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and Spirit Lake Nation, remanded by the Supreme Court last month, may eventually clarify whether private citizens can bring suit under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. UCLA Voting Rights Project faculty director Matt Barreto said a Supreme Court ruling in that dispute could affect the Arkansas voter assistance decision within six months to a year. The comment deadline for the USPS proposed rule remains July 2, 2026.

Update, June 24, 2026: Postmaster General David Steiner told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that the Postal Service will not deliver mail ballots in states whose officials refuse to hand over the voter lists the rule demands, according to Reuters. It was the first time the agency’s head confirmed publicly that ballots would be blocked, not just that the rule allows it. Steiner tied the plan to Trump’s March executive order requiring USPS to deliver ballots only to voters on federally controlled lists.

All 47 members of the Senate Democratic caucus signed a joint letter calling on the Postal Service to abandon the plan, arguing it would “fundamentally upend” the agency’s role and that Congress, not the president, sets the rules for the mail. Lawmakers at the hearing called the threat “blatantly illegal.” The July 2 public comment deadline on the rule has not changed.