Election officials warn new USPS mail-ballot rules could overwhelm states before November vote

State and local election officials across the United States are warning that the U.S. Postal Service's recently announced mail-ballot regulations could be impossible to implement before the November midterm elections. The rule, published on Aug. 21, would require each ballot envelope to carry a unique barcode and would obligate jurisdictions to enter voter data into a new federal portal at least 30 days before the election. Officials say the changes would entail massive costs, extensive staff training and reprinting of millions of envelopes.

Anna Baldwin, director of voting-rights litigation at the Campaign Legal Center, said the requirements would be "effectively impossible" to meet before 2026 without causing widespread disenfranchisement and ballot delays. She noted that the rule imposes obligations not only on states but on the roughly 10,000 local jurisdictions that actually handle absentee voting.

In filings, a New York election official estimated that adding voters to the portal would require more than 10 years of cumulative staff work, while a California official calculated that scanning every ballot in the state would take about 43 years based on Postal Service estimates. Hawaii’s chief election officer said the state would have to discard $79,000 worth of pre-printed envelopes because they lack the required barcodes, and Colorado officials warned that reprinting 1.3 million envelopes could be financially prohibitive.

Washington, which conducts all elections by mail, faces similar hurdles; vendors indicated they could not reprint envelopes after Aug. 27, and the state estimates a $1.9 million cost to replace them. In Massachusetts, smaller municipalities would need new software to generate barcodes, a cost that could strain local budgets.

The Postal Service’s portal also presents challenges. Wisconsin’s election commission chair said the decentralized nature of the state’s election administration makes it "virtually impossible" to enroll every mail voter before the Sept. 17 deadline. New York’s board of elections co-executive director estimated the added work would total 20,000 hours, or 533 work weeks, across the state’s 58 local boards. Minnesota’s elections director projected 8,500 staff hours to become authorized portal users and manually add barcode data.

A federal judge has temporarily blocked key aspects of the rule for the Nov. 3 election while considering longer-term relief, and the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to allow the rule to take effect. The Postal Service maintains that the verification process should take less than a minute per ballot, but officials argue that the logistical and financial burdens could jeopardize timely delivery of mail ballots.