Trump Postal Service Announces It Will Deliver Mail-In Ballots Only To Voters The Federal Government Has Pre-Approved, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Mail Was Still Carrying Ballots To Americans The President Had Not Personally Vetted

WASHINGTON. The United States Postal Service announced Wednesday that it would refuse to deliver mail-in ballots to any voter not appearing on a federally approved list of citizens, resolving a long-standing concern that the nation's mail carriers were still delivering the instruments of self-government to Americans the executive branch had not personally cleared.

The policy operationalizes a March executive order in which President Trump directed the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to assemble a nationwide roster of verified citizens over the age of 18, and instructed the Postal Service to handle and accept mail-in ballots only from voters whose names appeared on it. The Constitution assigns the administration of elections to the individual states, an arrangement the order proposed to streamline by routing it through a single delivery service headquartered in Washington.

"For 250 years the mail has gone wherever the envelope said, no questions asked, and we simply asked the question," said one official within the administration, describing the requirement that a citizen's eligibility to receive a ballot now be confirmed against a list the federal government had never previously compiled. "If your name is on the list, your ballot is in the mail. If it is not, there has clearly been some kind of mistake, which you are welcome to take up with us after the election."

The announcement made explicit what the Postal Service's proposed rules had implied a month earlier, when the agency unveiled a system granting itself the power to withhold ballots from any voter it could not match to the new national roster. A federal judge had in late May declined to halt the effort on the grounds that the Postal Service had not yet done anything, a condition the Postal Service then proceeded to correct.

President Trump, who has maintained without evidence since 2020 that mail-in voting is riddled with fraud and who has repeatedly described his loss that year as an election he won, has cast the initiative as a defense of laws already barring noncitizens from voting. Independent reviews, state election officials, and the federal courts have found no such fraud, a discrepancy the order resolves by relocating the question from the courts to the mailroom.

At press time, a federal judge had blocked the policy as unconstitutional for this year's elections, writing that no law passed by Congress grants the Postal Service any authority over who may vote by mail, even as the White House announced it was confident it would ultimately prevail and would simply be back.