4 minPolitics
Federal Appeals Court Blocks Trump Administration's Mail-In Ballot Envelope Rules
The First Circuit ruled Thursday that the administration's proposed design requirements for mail-in ballot envelopes cannot be implemented in time for the midterms, citing the risk of disenfranchising millions of voters and the absence of evidence of fraud.
A federal appeals court on Thursday rejected the Trump administration's proposed rules for how the U.S. Postal Service handles mail-in ballots, finding that the requirements could prevent millions of Americans from obtaining and returning their ballots in time for the midterm elections.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit said in its opinion that it would be impossible for some states to reprint compliant envelopes at this stage, and that there is no record evidence of past fraud or a likelihood of impending fraud that would justify the changes. The ruling allows local election officials to proceed with the envelopes they have already designed and printed.
The proposed rules would have required both outbound and return federal ballot envelopes to meet specific design standards. They would have had to be automation compatible and feature both the Election Mail logo and a unique postal Intelligent Mail barcode, known as an IMb. That barcode, typically found under the destination address, encodes information such as mail class and destination routing code. While many ballot envelopes already include the logo and are automation compliant, few carry the barcode on return envelopes, according to Whitney Quesenbery, executive director at the Center for Civic Design.
Quesenbery said most envelopes were designed months ago, and some may have been printed earlier in the year. Elections offices often order enough envelopes for an entire election cycle at once, she noted, making late-stage redesigns impractical. Mail-in ballots for the midterms have already started to go out in some jurisdictions.
Elections are run by more than 10,000 offices nationwide, each operating on timelines measured in years and months rather than weeks. Since elections are administered locally, states also have their own statutory rules for ballot envelope design. In some cases, Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer at the National Association of Election Officials, said redesigning envelopes to be automation compliant would require a special session of the state legislature.
Small and rural jurisdictions would have been most at risk. Some do not have a full-time employee and rely on volunteers who write mail-in ballot envelopes by hand. Patrick said such offices would struggle to implement any kind of barcode requirement. She added that changes of that scale should be started in odd-numbered years to allow testing before elections held in even-numbered years.
The rules also called for a yet-to-be-released online portal for local and federal officials to share voter lists. Last week, a whistleblower said work on the portal had been rushed without enough time to test it. Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, said the administration's rules would have threatened chaos on multiple levels, including delayed or undelivered ballots, missed deadlines, and problems with the portal and incomplete voter lists that might not include voters who register later in the fall.
President Donald Trump has frequently voted by mail himself but has long attacked the practice, and he signed an executive order earlier this year in an attempt to restrict it. The court's decision means local elections officials who were being asked to pull off an envelope redesign in a matter of weeks, a process that typically takes months or longer, can now rest easy.
