Postmaster Confirms Work Halted on Mail-In Ballot Verification System

The head of the United States Postal Service has confirmed that the agency has stopped work on implementing a computer system that would verify mail-in ballots for the midterm elections, following an executive order from President Donald Trump. In an interview Thursday with the Associated Press, Postmaster General David Steiner said “we’re doing nothing,” due to a preliminary injunction upheld by the Supreme Court earlier this week.

Steiner declined to offer an opinion on the president’s executive order that led to the Postal Service’s mail-in ballot rule, saying he viewed the matter from the enforcement side: “It’s not up to me to decide which rules imposed on us I accept or not.”

The agency’s work on the voting system while an injunction remained in force was a concern for Democrats on Capitol Hill, after an anonymous whistleblower revealed it. Trump had asked states to adopt a uniform envelope style including barcodes and to submit lists of eligible voters to an online portal; if the new requirements were not met, the Postal Service could have refused to deliver mail-in ballots in states that did not adopt the new system.

Implementing the new system would have been a monumental task for the states with less than two months before the general elections; Alabama and North Carolina are among the states that have already begun early mail-in voting. After the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s emergency motion to enforce the voting restrictions, the Postal Service sent a memo to all employees declaring that it “will not enforce any of these new rules in the 2026 federal elections.”

Source: Washington Examiner