Hyperbolic headline, do you think? That all depends on how much faith you place in the Trump administration, institutions like the United States Postal Service, the integrity of the U.S. Supreme Court, and the warnings recently issued by a USPS whistleblower, who said that the organization’s “secretive, rushed” assembly of a national ballot-scanning system was dangerously buggy and ready to contribute to “catastrophic failure” and chaos during the upcoming midterm elections in November. So no, perhaps not hyperbolic at all. Or at the very least, it is surely accurate to say the following at this point: Don’t even think of voting by mail in 2026 … if you’re at all concerned about whether your vote will ultimately count.
By some metrics, that election has already begun. The mailing of ballots officially began in North Carolina and Delaware last Friday, meaning that votes for the midterm can already be returned in that state, even though the USPS is still caught between dueling directives from the Trump administration and a federal judge, with no legal clarity over what is supposed to be happening in each critical hour going forward. The Trump admin’s executive order is designed to severely restrict the use of mail ballots, requiring all states to upload lists of eligible voters who will receive mail ballots to the still-under-construction portal being designed by the USPS. Simultaneously, the order requires any state using mail ballots to have special bar codes on the envelopes of those ballots to be scanned into that portal, despite the fact that printing of envelopes is obviously a process that must be carried out far in advance in order to give time for mailing and returning of envelopes. Attempting to actively implement the government’s executive order at this point, less than 60 days before the election, could potentially require state governments to start their ballot/envelope design process all over again, making mail voting effectively impossible. That is, assuming the USPS portal is even functional as well. In the worst case scenario, unthinkable numbers of ballots that are already printed or mailed out to residents could end up invalidated. Or as the anonymous whistleblower put it: “Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all.”
The Justice Department’s (DOJ) various court filings defending the U.S. Postal Service’s (USPS) new voting restrictions remain mum on when important components of the rule necessary to comply will become available, even as states start sending out ballots. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/…
— Marc Elias (@marcelias.bsky.social) 4:37 PM · Sep 6, 2026
Whether or not the demands of this executive order are now applied will rest with the U.S. Supreme Court, which has once again been requested in an emergency application to decide whether the USPS rules for mail ballots can go into effect. Just weeks ago, the same court kicked the can down the road by ruling that states did not yet have standing to claim damages because the government/USPS had not yet put their plan into concrete action. Since then, the USPS has published materials detailing how it is complying with the executive order, seemingly making the actions the government is taking more concrete, and more likely to draw an actual ruling. The Trump administration, naturally, requested that the USPS rules be allowed to immediately go into affect before the Court issues a ruling, but that request was ignored. Now we sit, waiting for both sides to submit their arguments by this coming Wednesday, with the fate of millions of ballots on the line. The Trump-dominated Supreme Court will interpret the law, and in doing so decide whether to plunge the midterm elections into abject chaos.
“It is unlawful,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, in a statement to The New York Times decrying the USPS plan. “And with fewer than 60 days to go before the November election, there is not a shred of evidence that states could comply with it without disenfranchising voters who rely on mail ballots.”
if the supreme court upholds the USPS mailing shit you can expect every red state to immediately slash polling places and move them around as fast as possible to fuck up the in person voting
— hammancheez (@hammancheez.bsky.social) 5:43 PM · Sep 3, 2026
The most rational, pragmatic approach to such an assault on democracy–in addition to the mass protests and chaos in the streets that is likely coming–is for the average voter to circumvent the now crippled mail voting system entirely. Any American who possesses the ability to vote in any way that is not a mail ballot should be planning to cast their vote in that other way, whatever it may be. If your state has early, in-person voting, I highly encourage you to look into it, and to vote in person as early as you possibly can. You should expect to be one of many: We can likely expect methods of in-person voting to suffer from far longer lines and overwhelming numbers of people as voters understandably attempt to avoid a mail voting system where absolutely nothing can be taken for granted. Even if the Supreme Court utterly rejects Trump’s executive order as unconstitutional, it’s unknown how the ripple effects will branch out across states that have either mailed their ballots or are about to do exactly that, or how the USPS will handle the whiplash of these stop-and-go instructions. The further you can keep your ballot away from all of this, the better.
Unfortunately, this will be easier said than done for millions of Americans, given that some states have fully migrated almost all of their elections processes to revolve around universal mail voting. Washington State, for instance, is one of a small group of states that now conducts universal mail voting, sending ballots to every registered voter, while transitioning away almost entirely from traditional, in-person polling places on election day. If the USPS were to declare that state’s envelopes invalid en masse, there is literally no reasonable alternative already in place: Washington’s Secretary of State told The New York Times that the state is not equipped to have its citizens vote in person. Chaos would be more or less guaranteed, regardless of whatever emergency pivot (temporary voting centers, a hastily designed online system) the state chose. And of course, that chaos would only make the Trump administration levy more charges of the widespread voter fraud it has never been able to locate or prove.
“As presently designed, if even one bar code on one single ballot in a bulk-mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to properly scan during the verification process, the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the state – effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed to voters”
— Crystal Fincher (@finchfrii.bsky.social) 4:25 PM · Sep 5, 2026
While the delays creep onward, the ballots are already going out. Sixteen more states are scheduled to send ballots and envelopes to their voters within the next 10 days or so. Do those envelopes contain the special bar codes mandated by the Trump administration’s executive order? Do the states even have actual instructions for what those bar codes are supposed to look like? I rather doubt it. If the Supreme Court justices rule in favor of the Trump administration, what will that mean for the millions of ballots already passing through its system? Will they be intercepted and destroyed? Delivered to voters, but then invalidated when voters return them? What of the ones that have already been returned before the Supreme Court rules? No one can adequately explain what will happen, because we’re talking about 50 states with separate, sovereign voting systems, all in danger of being upended by Trump’s executive branch attempting to seize control over elections at the eleventh hour, in the name of “election security.”
Obviously, we have no choice but to hope that the hands of the Supreme Court justices are effectively tied by the overwhelmingly negative outcomes that would result from siding with the Trump administration, and that even the conservative justices would be terrified by the chaos they would be unleashing by potentially disenfranchising millions of Americans in the weeks leading up to a critical national election. But absolutely nothing here can be taken for granted, which is why every voter should be planning to vote in their own state in whichever way is least likely to be legally challenged by a historically unpopular administration that wants to retain its power not through democracy but by putting its fist on the scale in the most shameless manner imaginable.
If you care about whether your vote ultimately counts, then please don’t leave any element to chance.
