At Trump’s Direction, the U.S. Postal Service Builds a Portal to Monitor Mail Voting

The U.S. Postal Service is being drawn into a political and legal dispute over how millions of mail-in ballots will be sent and checked in the November midterm elections. North Carolina election authorities mailed the first batch of absentee ballots on Friday to voters who had previously registered for postal voting. Nine other states are expected to do the same soon.

Mail voting has become increasingly common in the United States. About 8 percent of voters cast ballots by mail in 1996. Today, the share is around one-third, and more than 30 million Americans voted by post in the 2022 midterms.

That scale has made the publicly owned postal service vulnerable to political pressure. Donald Trump has opposed mail voting since losing the 2020 presidential election, when more than 40 percent of ballots were cast by mail during the pandemic. Trump called that election stolen and has argued that postal voting is particularly vulnerable to manipulation.

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Studies and audits of election results, however, show that mail-in voting fraud is very rare. Election districts across the country have also tightened their security controls over the past decade.

Trump has revived the issue in the 2026 election year, claiming that hundreds of thousands of immigrants registered to vote. Experts estimate that figure is vastly exaggerated. In March, Trump ordered stricter and uniform rules for mail ballots in the name of protecting “election integrity.” The order assigned the Postal Service the task of implementing a politically sensitive reform during an election year.

Democrats view the measure as a poorly disguised attempt to weaken their voters’ influence in the midterms. Democratic voters still use mail voting more often than Republicans, although the gap has narrowed. Twenty-three Democratic-led states quickly sued, arguing that Trump had violated the states’ rights under the federal system. Election officials also warn that the proposed database could produce chaos, while practical obstacles may prevent the plan from working as intended.

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