Late-arriving mail ballots mount in key states as officials push voter outreach

Bipartisan officials had warned the order would cause administrative disaster

State election officials are stepping up public outreach efforts to assure voters that mail-in voting remains secure as data show mounting rejections of late-arriving ballots in key states ahead of the 2026 midterms.

In Washington state, where every registered voter receives a mail-in ballot, election officials rejected more than 20,000 votes in the August primary because they arrived late at an election office. In Wisconsin, the state’s April election saw an increase in late-arriving ballots; there have been higher rates of late-arriving ballots tossed this year, according to an analysis by the New York Times.

The push follows the US Supreme Court’s Monday ruling against President Trump’s order imposing new restrictions on mail-in voting, a ruling Trump posted about on Truth Social. The order would have required states to redesign mail-in envelopes and upload lists of voters to the US Postal Service — rules that officials from both parties said were not feasible to implement before ballots began going out. The effort was seen as a push by the government to change voting policy and weaken confidence in voting by mail.

Twenty-nine percent of Americans voted by mail in the 2024 presidential election, and roughly one third cast mail-in ballots in the 2022 midterms, according to researchers at the MIT election lab. The researchers found that Democrats were more likely than Republicans to cast mail-in ballots.

In Wisconsin, where state law requires mail-in ballots to be delivered by the close of polls on Election Day in order to count, state officials are urging voters to return their ballots earlier. In a video released on Tuesday, Meagan Wolfe, the administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said voters returning their ballots by mail should do so “at least two weeks before the election.” Wolfe also advised voters to contact their municipal clerk to find out about drop-box or in-person return options in their community.

Wisconsin election officials have encouraged voters to return their ballots sooner through county websites, social media, and notes attached to ballots, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “We’re really trying to encourage people to act sooner. So hopefully they take that to heart,” said Ann Jacobs, a Democrat on the Wisconsin Elections Commission. “It’s hard to tell people, ‘No, really, you should trust the post office’ when they came up with this absolutely cockamamie rule that was going to eliminate absentee voting.”

In Washington state, Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said voters remained skeptical despite the court victory. “There is a sense of distrust,” Hobbs said. “Even though there is a victory in the courts, we still are urging our voters to put their ballot in a drop-box.”

In Nevada, where mail-in voting is widely used, Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat who serves as the top election official in the state, said voters had expressed concerns about whether they could trust the mail. “There’s just concern: ‘Can we trust the mail?’ And I say yes, because it’s not the leadership or the management of the postal service that’s actually going to have their hands on the ballots, it’s the postal workers who are on our side,” he said. Nevada officials also plan to run a series of public service announcements to educate voters on the election process.

In Arizona, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, said his office had emphasized throughout the litigation that the rule had not gone into effect, so nothing around voting by mail had changed. Since the Supreme Court’s ruling preserved that status quo, Fontes said, officials haven’t had to shift their messaging. “We continue to tell them until there’s a change, there is no change,” Fontes said. “We are still where we were. We never jumped on the paranoia bandwagon.”

Some officials sharply criticized the order. “That is the whole intent of the president. He wanted to build doubt,” said Aguilar, the top election official in Nevada. “He wanted to create chaos.”

Fontes, the top election official in Arizona, went further. “It’s intentionally damaging to the entire elections administration process in this country,” he said. “The administration, by their actions, have proven that they are hell-bent on driving American voters away from their own elections. And we’ve been working very hard to counter that.”