Supreme Court blocks Postal Service mail-ballot rules until after November
ProPublica published the five-takeaway summary of its yearlong reporting on federal election policy ahead of next week’s midterm elections. The outlet wrote that Trump “has systematically demolished institutional guardrails that prevented him from overturning the 2020 presidential election,” and that he has empowered loyalists to try to transform the voting process, launched what it described as an unprecedented and largely unsuccessful effort to find noncitizen voters, and tried to restrict mail-in voting.
In April, reporters Doug Bock Clark and Jen Fifield detailed how the administration had discarded or diminished work across the federal government to protect the voting process or block foreign interference, including by cutting staff on election-related teams at federal law enforcement agencies, according to the summary. ProPublica reported that at least 75 nonpartisan career officials who had held roles at federal agencies related to election integrity and safety have been fired or left the government, while two dozen Trump appointees — including many from the election-denial movement — have been hired.
Current and former government officials and election security experts told the outlet they are concerned that once-fringe actors who have espoused debunked conspiracy theories about elections are now positioned to control the narrative around the voting process. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the department hires “experts with diverse backgrounds who go through a rigorous vetting process.”
ProPublica reported that at least 25 administration appointees have close ties to Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who leads Election Integrity Network, a grassroots conservative group focused on transforming the voting system. This month, Clark profiled Mitchell and detailed how, despite not holding a formal role in the White House, she has played a key role in shaping the Trump administration’s elections agenda. The White House has appointed her associates to help hunt for noncitizen voters and investigate accusations of voting fraud in 2020, the outlet reported.
Mitchell, who played a role in helping Trump challenge his loss in the 2020 presidential election, has been leading efforts to pass state and federal versions of the SAVE Act; the 2026 version, the SAVE America Act, would require voters nationwide to provide proof of citizenship to register and present a photo ID to vote, and would compel states to turn over their voter rolls to DHS. Trump has repeatedly called the measure his top legislative priority, but it has been blocked in the Senate.
Mitchell declined multiple requests to speak with ProPublica. In an email, she wrote: “You’re my opponent. … You’re never going to write in any objective, non-judgmental way about the election integrity movement.”
Reporting led by Peter Elkind found that the administration harnessed Homeland Security Investigations’ personnel, technology and legal authority to try to back up Trump’s unproven claim that illegal voting by noncitizens is tilting elections toward Democrats. Administration officials insisted the effort was producing meaningful results. ProPublica’s analysis of Justice Department data found that, as of May, 41 alleged noncitizens had been charged with voting illegally or other election-related crimes; earlier this month, CBS reported that 156 people have been charged since the beginning of the second Trump administration.
As part of that effort, the Justice Department has demanded that states turn over unredacted voter rolls, which contain confidential information on millions of Americans and have historically been managed by the states. Since September 2025, the department has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for the data. State officials, including some Republicans, have fought back, and so far every department lawsuit decided by a federal judge has been dismissed. The administration has appealed most of its losses to federal appeals courts and has said it will consider taking the fight to the Supreme Court. A Justice Department spokesperson said its “attorneys are skilled, principled advocates who argue every case honestly and in good faith.”
In a March executive order, Trump instructed the U.S. Postal Service to create new regulations for mail voting — rules that would have put the agency in the unprecedented position of deciding whether to send or deny delivery of voters’ mail-in ballots. The Supreme Court in September blocked the rules, at least until after November. ProPublica reported that the administration had initially proposed delivering all ballots through certified mail, which would have required voters to be home to sign for them, and dropped the plan after the Postal Service said it would be too difficult to execute. It instead proceeded with the executive order that would have forced postal workers to serve as gatekeepers, deciding which ballots would be delivered and which would not.
White House spokesperson Lauren Bis, in an emailed statement, denied that the administration had interfered improperly with the Postal Service, an independent agency whose governance structure is designed to protect it from political influence.
Because of the Supreme Court’s order, mail voting can proceed as planned for the midterms, with states left to decide their own rules. A ProPublica analysis found that delays resulting from the Postal Service’s cost-cutting in recent years have endangered the validity of ballots cast in rural areas: the agency has consolidated first-class mail processing into regional hubs and cut the frequency of mail pickups in half at many post offices 50 miles or more from those processing plants, changes that often added a day or more to delivery time and pushed back postmarking. Across five states where the best data was available — Washington, California, Ohio, North Carolina and Oregon — the delays during this year’s primary elections had the most substantial effect in areas that voted for Trump in 2024, according to the analysis. Postal Service leaders say such delays are less likely in the Nov. 3 general election because of “extraordinary measures” the agency puts in place for those votes.
In July, Trump also pushed out the remaining members of the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission, a four-member board designed to be evenly split between Republicans and Democrats that sets standards for state voting systems. At the time, a White House official would not confirm the moves but said the president “reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted.”
A few months into Trump’s second term, political appointees at DHS asked the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to procure a voting machine, hack it and report the findings so they could be given to the White House, two former administration officials with knowledge of the request told Clark and Andy Mannix. CISA employees told the appointees the request was impossible, in part because the agents capable of such an operation had just been laid off by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. One of Trump’s first actions when he returned to the White House was to dismantle the agency’s election security work, according to the outlet.
Though not acted on, the request shows how the Trump administration has tried to use the agency for its own ends while draining it of resources for one of its critical missions: protecting the nation’s voting systems. Since CISA became an agency in 2018, it has come to provide crucial support to thousands of local election officials grappling with increasingly sophisticated attacks.
Some state election officials said CISA provided them with little help as they planned for the 2026 midterms, and other state authorities told the reporters they no longer trusted the agency and feared it had been compromised, according to the summary. A DHS spokesperson told ProPublica in April that the “claim that DHS has a broken partnership with states and made our elections less secure is simply false.” DHS did not respond to questions for the October investigation, but a spokesperson previously said the changes at CISA were in response to “a ballooning budget concealing a dangerous departure from its statutory mission,” which it said included “electioneering instead of defending America’s critical infrastructure.”
The administration has said its actions will make U.S. elections fairer and more secure and will keep those prohibited from voting, such as noncitizens, from casting ballots. Spokespeople for the Justice Department and DHS emphasized that their departments are focused on ensuring elections are free and fair and that they are working closely with the states; contentions to the contrary, they say, are false. A White House spokesperson declined an interview request but said, “President Trump has done more than any other President to ensure we have free and fair elections.”