Election Officials Balk at USPS Mail-Ballot Security Rules, Citing Costs Over Election Integrity
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State and local election officials are pushing back against the Postal Service's new mail-ballot requirements, complaining about costs and logistics, even as the rules are designed to enhance election security and prevent fraud ahead of the November vote.
State and local election officials across the United States are voicing complaints about the U.S. Postal Service's recently announced mail-ballot regulations, arguing that implementing them before the November midterm elections would be difficult. The rule, published on Aug. 21, would require each ballot envelope to carry a unique barcode and would require jurisdictions to enter voter data into a new federal portal at least 30 days before the election. Officials claim these changes would entail significant costs, staff training, and reprinting of millions of envelopes, but these are necessary steps to ensure election integrity and prevent fraud.
Anna Baldwin, director of voting-rights litigation at the Campaign Legal Center, predictably criticized the requirements as "effectively impossible" to meet before 2026, warning of disenfranchisement and delays. However, the rule is aimed at holding states and the approximately 10,000 local jurisdictions accountable for securing absentee voting, which has been plagued by vulnerabilities in recent years.
In official 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. Hawaii’s chief election officer said the state would have to discard $79,000 worth of pre-printed envelopes lacking the required barcodes, and Colorado officials warned that reprinting 1.3 million envelopes could be expensive. But these are the costs of ensuring that every vote is legitimate and that the system is not abused.
Washington, which conducts all elections by mail, faces similar challenges; 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 necessary investment to modernize and secure the voting process.
The Postal Service’s portal is also under fire. 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. While these numbers sound daunting, they reflect the scale of the challenge in cleaning up and securing the mail-ballot system.
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 rightly 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, and these common-sense measures are essential to restore public confidence in the mail-ballot process, even if election officials resist the necessary work to protect our democracy.