
Read below in the CBS report through the harrowing voting requirements that Trump has imposed and that need to be implemented by the Post Office and by State administrations before this November.
It's nothing more than a ploy by the criminal Trump administration to undermine the elections by challenging millions and millions of ballots under false pretenses built into these requirements. Every one of the detailed requirements below is a trap that Trump will use to challenge and discard ballots on claims, requirements that State officials and the Post Office are saying are unimplementable.
Trump's attorneys are readying themselves for endless challenges to election results that do not go Trump's way. Remember his "find me 11,780 votes" to Georgia's Secretary of State in a telephone call in 2020? Notice the precision in the numbers reflecting the exact margin that the idiot Trump needed to overturn the 2020 elections. A criminal but a fool nonetheless.
This is exactly what he's planning to do with every State election this coming November. His weapon? Those requirements that are impossible to meet, and when they are not met, Trump can argue that the ballots in question must be thrown out. He will do this in States he will lose, but not in States he will win. His criminality is of such stupid mediocrity.
All the challenges Trump filed for his loss in 2020 returned one verdict: No widespread fraud occurred. Trump says he is tightening voting rules because he keep falsely claiming that non-citizens vote, a xenophobic argument that makes his herd of racist peasant morons drool. Then, the criminal-minded moron assumes that non-citizens vote Democrat, which is not true. Immigrants generally are non-elitist, religious and conservative-minded and vote republican. Moreover, the fact is that non-citizen voting is vanishingly rare, accounting for less than 0.001% of all ballots cast in U.S. elections. Here are the stats per AI:
In the 2020 election, the Census identified over 24,000 non-citizen voter records out of nearly 160 million total ballots, a figure that includes data matching errors and does not confirm actual voting.
A 2017 Brennan Center for Justice study found only 30 suspected non-citizen votes across 23.5 million ballots in 42 jurisdictions (0.0001%), a suspicion that remains unfounded.
State audits consistently yield minimal results; for example, Utah’s 2025–2026 review of over 2 million registrants identified just 27 confirmed non-citizen registrations, while Nevada’s Department of Homeland Security confirmed only 185 non-citizens on its rolls after initially claiming thousands. And these are "registered" but not actual "voting" individuals whose names and addresses are often mixed up with citizens names and addresses.
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Election officials raise alarm over mail voting rules: "Virtually impossible"
Melissa Quinn
Updated Fri, September 4, 2026

Washington — As legal battles over the U.S. Postal Service's new regulations for mail ballots move forward, state and local election officials are raising concerns about the logistical hurdles they will have to surmount to implement the requirements just weeks before the November elections.
Mail ballots will go out to voters in several states in mid-September — and by Friday in one — leaving election officials with little time to make the changes that the Postal Service is calling for, if the rule is allowed to take effect. In Wisconsin, clerks in two municipalities have already sent out ballots, since state law allows them to do so as soon as the results of the primaries are certified.
The Trump administration has said the rule imposes "modest informational requirements" on states and localities, and "should not prevent a single voter from voting by mail."
But numerous top election officials are warning that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to satisfy the new requirements, saying they would impose significant financial costs and strain resources.
"The bottom line is that it is effectively impossible for these requirements to be implemented in advance of 2026 without causing mass disenfranchisement and ballot delays," Anna Baldwin, director of voting rights litigation at the Campaign Legal Center, told CBS News. "There are 10,000 local jurisdictions in the country that administer elections. When we think about this as a rule imposing requirements on the states, that's true. But more importantly, it's a rule that imposes requirements on every jurisdiction that actually does the mechanics of absentee balloting."
The states' concerns over the new processes have been detailed in remarkable court filings in the ongoing legal battle. One official in New York said that adding voters to a new portal would require more than 10 years' worth of cumulative work by state and local employees. Another from California said that based on Postal Service estimates, scanning individual ballots for every voter in the state would take roughly 43 years, underscoring the huge logistical hurdles that states are facing.
What the new rule does
The new rule was published by the Postal Service on Aug. 21. A federal judge overseeing a lawsuit brought by 24 states led by Democrats and the District of Columbia has temporarily barred the agency from implementing key aspects of the measure for the Nov. 3 elections. The judge, Indira Talwani, is considering whether to grant the states longer-term relief.
But while Talwani weighs that request, the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to intervene and allow the Postal Service to enforce the new regulations just weeks ahead of the midterms.
Under the rule, states must include specific design elements on mail ballot envelopes, including barcodes that are unique to each voter. State or local election officials must also submit certain voter information into an online portal, including their names, addresses and barcodes. Those voters will be enrolled with the Postal Service and included on state-specific "Mail-In and Absentee Participation Lists."
The rule requires postal workers to review and verify ballot mail being sent to voters by states and localities. Any ballot mailings that don't comply with the requirements "will not be accepted and will be returned" to the election offices, the Postal Service said.
The court submissions from election officials highlight not only the difficulties with adhering to the Postal Service's new regulations, but also the varying procedures and rules that govern each state's elections, a reflection of the Constitution's command that states are responsible for setting the "times, places and manner" of elections.
"Deciding whether to have a mail voting program, when to say everybody's eligible to receive a mail ballot or only some people who have an absentee excuse who are sick or out of the jurisdiction, that is the variability that states have defined and it's their power to do that under the Constitution," Baldwin said. "The idea is that state governments get to create those powers and those laws because they're in touch with their voters and they're responsive to their constituents."
Separate from the concerns of election officials, a whistleblower has warned of "potentially catastrophic problems" with the Postal Service's system. The agency's new mail ballot portal is "untested" and its development "rushed," the whistleblower said in a disclosure provided to Congress. The anonymous official also warned that the Postal Service's new verification process could keep significant numbers of mail ballots from being delivered.
Paper shortages and already-printed envelopes
In declarations submitted to the federal court in Boston, numerous election officials from different states said that in order to adhere to the ballot design requirements, they would have to scrap envelopes that have already been paid for and printed.
Scott Nago, Hawaii's chief election officer, said in a filing that the state would have to throw out the envelopes used by voters to return their ballots, since they were printed with a static barcode for each of its four county clerks. Those already-ordered return envelopes cost the state $79,000, Nago said.
He also warned that "it may not be possible to get new orders of [those] envelopes delivered to Hawaii from the continent on such short notice."
In Colorado, which expects to mail more than 4 million ballots to voters for the upcoming election, two of its vendors have said that they would have to get rid of a combined 1.3 million already-printed ballot return envelopes because they don't contain individualized barcodes.
Reprinting those envelopes "would impose significant costs on Colorado counties and may not even be possible depending on how widespread an issue this is and whether the vendors can procure sufficient paper," Hilary Rudy, the deputy state elections director, said in a filing.
Vendors for Washington state have also poured cold water on their ability to reprint ballot envelopes to meet the Postal Service's design rules. The state anticipates sending ballots to 5.1 million voters for the upcoming election. But one of three vendors used by Washington counties to print election materials indicated it couldn't reprint ballot envelopes after Aug. 27, while a second indicated it didn't have the capacity to print new envelopes at all, Director of Elections Stuart Holmes said.
Even still, the state estimates reprinting all ballot envelopes would cost $1.9 million.
"This would be catastrophic for Washington elections because Washington is an entirely vote-by-mail state and the State no longer has the infrastructure to accommodate a last-minute reversion to in-person voting," Holmes said.
Potential paper issues are also plaguing Oregon's ability to reprint envelopes.
The state's vendors "do not have a stockpile of paper," said Oregon Elections Director Dena Dawson. "Post-pandemic paper supply shortages mean that paper suppliers may not be able to timely supply our vendors with the paper they need" to provide new envelopes.
But even adding the unique, voter-specific barcodes required on ballot envelopes presents issues for states and municipalities, election officials said.
In Massachusetts, state law does not require envelopes to include the specific barcodes mandated by the Postal Service, so its 351 municipalities would have to obtain new computer software to create and apply the codes. Doing so would be a costly endeavor for some of Massachusetts' smaller municipalities who don't mail large numbers of ballots to voters, said Michelle Tassinari, who leads Massachusetts' elections division.
"To require these municipalities to purchase equipment capable of applying an Intelligent Mail barcode would likely deplete their municipal budgets," she said in a filing.
In Colorado, 14 of its 64 counties do not use the barcodes required by the Postal Service on ballot mail, and most of its counties do not include those markings on return envelopes.
Adopting the unique barcodes depends in part on population size, Rudy, the deputy state elections director said: 71% of the counties that do not use the barcodes have a population of less than 10,000 active registered voters.
"These counties typically employ a single individual to administer elections and often manually print ballots, stuff envelopes, and mail ballots by hand," she wrote. "These counties likely would be unable to comply with the IMb requirement, and by extension, Colorado's requirement that they mail a ballot to every active voter."
In Maryland, voters can opt to access their ballot online through a secure email link, and the state expects roughly 72,000 ballots will be delivered by email and returned through the mail. Those voters either print the return envelope or hand address it using a state-provided template. But these return envelopes don't have unique barcodes, and the Maryland State Board of Elections "has not identified a technical or manual way to do this," said Melissia Dorsey, the state's assistant deputy administrator for election policy.
"As a result, this rule potentially disenfranchises all mail-in voters who are signed up to receive mail-in ballots via secure email link," she said in a declaration.
The mail ballot portal
The Postal Service's new regulations require state or local elections officials to submit specific data to the "Federal Ballot Mail Portal" before mail ballots can be sent to voters. Initial lists of voters who will receive mail ballots must be entered at least 30 days before the election, though states can add, change or remove data from the portal to account for new voters, new requests for mail ballots or other changes.
But state officials warned that the process of enrolling their voters into the portal will be time intensive.
Don Millis, a Republican who chairs the Wisconsin Election Commission, said the Postal Service has not issued instructions on how to use the portal or how to authorize users. He warned in a filing that it would be "virtually impossible" to ensure that each mail voter in Wisconsin is enrolled through the portal.
"As a practical matter it's not feasible given the decentralized nature of this. It's going to be a very challenging environment if the stay is lifted," he told CBS News, referring to the judge's order temporarily blocking the rule.
Wisconsin's elections are administered by 1,850 municipal clerks, and more than 2,500 employees can make changes to voter records on the state's voter registration system, he said. As a result, those 2,500 workers would need to be trained on how to use the portal, be granted access to it and then enter voters' data before Sept. 17, when clerks are required under state law to send out mail ballots.
"I think it's good to do what you can to prevent noncitizens from voting, but I think many people at the national level have this incorrect view of mail-in ballots," he said. "It's not the first time that Republicans at the national level have shot themselves in the foot."
New York's co-executive director of the state Board of Elections, Kristen Zebrowski Stavisky, estimated that it will take roughly an additional minute per voter to include them on the Postal Service's list and address any issues. Across the state's 58 local boards of elections, she said that amounts to 20,000 additional hours of effort, or 533 work weeks.
Paul Linnell, Minnesota's elections director, said it will take roughly 8,500 hours for elections staff to become authorized users of the portal and enroll voters. Linnell said barcode information is not included in the state's voter registration system and will need to be added manually to the new federal portal.
"Even assuming the data verification, entry, and submission process takes only 1 minute per voter, this adds up to a significant amount of staff time that must be diverted from other critical activities," he said.
On its end, the Postal Service has estimated it should take mail workers less than a minute to scan a ballot's barcode, so the verification process for large mailings should take "no more than a few hours."
But the states said that under that time frame, it would take the Postal Service 43 years to scan mail ballots from all of California's 23 million registered voters, if they all cast their ballots by mail. For the 2024 general election, 16 million mail ballots were cast, according to data from the secretary of state.
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Federal judge extends block on new USPS mail ballot rules
DEVIN DWYER
Sat, September 5, 2026

The federal judge handling the legal battle over new U.S. Postal Service mail ballot rules extended her block of the rules for the November midterm elections in an order issued on Friday, again finding them likely unlawful.
Judge Indira Talwani's temporary order, which had been set to expire on Sept. 10, is now in place indefinitely unless a higher court allows the Trump administration to put the rules into effect.
The judge found that immediate implementation of the rules this close to the November election, prompted by President Donald Trump's executive order aimed at tightening access to mail ballots, "threatens disenfranchisement of millions of United States citizens who seek to vote by mail."
Talwani concluded that the rules, which mandate nationwide mail ballot design and review requirements and state submission of a voter information database to USPS, are "unconstitutional where it intrudes not only on Congress's Elections Clause powers but also that power left to the States."
The decision ups the ante for the U.S. Supreme Court, which had already been asked to weigh in on Talwani's preliminary injunction. A decision is expected as soon as next week.
Time is of the essence since some states have already begun mailing ballots for the fall election.

Hannah Beier/Reuters, FILE - PHOTO: A mail-in ballot, during the Pennsylvania primary election, is displayed in Philadelphia, May 19, 2026.
Trump, who has pushed unfounded claims of widespread mail ballot fraud, wants states to report to USPS basic voter information, such as a voter's name and home address, attached to a unique barcode on every mail-in ballot distributed. Postal workers would then only deliver ballots addressed to voters who appear on the state-provided list.
Following the publication of the regulations last month, dozens of Democratic state attorneys general sued the Trump administration after an earlier lawsuit was blocked by the Supreme Court, which said at the time that the challenge was premature since the regulations hadn't been finalized.
Judge Talwani wrote in her opinion Friday that the dispute was now ripe for judicial intervention. "Nothing is hypothetical," she said of the alleged harm to states, voters and voter advocacy groups ahead of the November election.
In its latest appeal to the justices, the Trump administration insisted the rules impose only "modest" ballot design and review requirements on states and that a requirement to submit name, address, and barcode information of intended recipients is not onerous or intrusive.
The states challenging the USPS rule have until Tuesday, Sept. 8, at 10 a.m. to formally respond before the Supreme Court makes a decision.
The states and voter advocacy groups have argued that the new USPS regulations are an attempt by the Trump administration to federalize elections, which are historically and constitutionally managed by each state, and make it harder to vote by mail for everyday citizens.===============================================
Legal veterans lead fightback against Trump’s ‘full-out assault on democracy’Peter Stone in Washington
Mon, September 7, 2026
A cluster of advocacy groups that boast veteran lawyers, voting experts and ex-judges have expanded legal challenges to Donald Trump's authoritarian executive orders on voting and other presidential actions they see as a "war" on the rule of law in the US.
Heavy legal opposition to Trump's two executive orders on elections to curb voting rights and supplant the authority of states on election matters has come from the Democracy Defenders Fund, the Campaign Legal Center, the American Civil Liberties Union and kindred groups.
These legal outfits and like-minded allies have won key lawsuits on election issues, plus litigation thwarting Trump's moves to end birthright citizenship and a $1.8bn slush fund that could have paid money to allies including January 6 rioters he deemed were unjustly charged.
Since Trump returned to power, for instance, Democracy Defenders Fund and the Campaign Legal Center have jointly filed lawsuits against Trump's 2025 and 2026 executive orders on voting, challenging their constitutionality to set new voting rules that by law are run by the states.
Key legal briefs they filed together include an August one on behalf of several voting rights groups and local officials in two states to block Trump's March 2026 executive order that would restrict voting by mail and authorize the US Postal Service to implement rules to that end.
Other groups that have accelerated their legal challenges to Trump's moves to thwart voting rights and expand his executive powers in other ways, include the Brennan Center for Justice, Democracy Forward, the Democratic Attorneys General Association and the Washington Litigation Group.
Last month, for instance, 24 Democratic attorney generals and other plaintiffs filed suit to block USPS from moving forward with rules to curb mail voting and in late August won a temporary 14-day restraining order from federal judge Indira Talwani in Massachusetts.
In response, the DoJ's solicitor general John Sauer on Thursday appealed to the supreme court to lift the injunction, arguing in heated words that the freeze would create "serious, irreparable harm on the federal government, the states themselves, and the voting public".
On 4 September Talwani made her injunction permanent, writing that implementing Trump's order so close to the election "threatens disenfranchisement of millions of United States citizens who seek to vote by mail." She also stressed that "the record includes no evidence relating to fraudulent mail voting to support the rushed implementation."
Sauer on 6 September responded with another emergency appeal to the high court urging it permit the new USPS rules to go into effect, claiming that it "does not seize control of states' administration of elections — it simply imposes reasonable preparation requirements for certain election-related mail."
In a related twist, a detailed whistleblower complaint that Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut released last week alleged that the USPS has been proceeding with a "secretive, rushed" effort to implement Trump's order that could lead to "catastrophic failure" with this year's mail-in voting.
About 50 million Americans, the majority of whom are Democrats, vote by mail, according to reports.
With the elections about two months away, the legal groups are stepping up efforts to thwart "self-serving attempts to take over the midterms", said a former DoJ lawyer, which experts fear may create chaos and disenfranchise millions of voters.
Anna Baldwin, director of voting rights litigation at the Campaign Legal Center, told the Guardian: "The CLC and the DDF have worked closely together on two ongoing lawsuits challenging the president's unlawful voting executive orders that attempt to dictate election rules. We've teamed up in the supreme court on a brief filed by former state and federal judges, including noted conservative judges, that emphasized just how unlawful and dangerous the president's efforts to dictate election rules are."
Baldwin, who spent 14 years in the justice department's civil rights division, said the CLC and the DDF have also "worked together in federal cases filed in Oregon and California to make sure that the DoJ isn't able to seize voters' sensitive data by making false claims about non-citizen voting. In cases around the country, the Campaign Legal Center is pushing back on the DoJ's lawless efforts to vacuum up and aggregate sensitive data to create a national voter file of some sort."
Further, former ambassador Norm Eisen, the executive chair of the Democracy Defenders Fund, which he co-founded in 2023, told the Guardian that since its inception the DDF has been involved in more than 300 legal cases and matters in three primary areas: elections, the rule of law and anti-corruption.
Eisen said the group, whose board boasts former federal judge and conservative stalwart J Michael Luttig and liberal-leaning ex-federal judge Nancy Gertner, likes to work in conjunction on cases with other ideologically diverse and nonpartisan groups like the CLC and the WLG because "they both have strong bipartisan credibility. It's a big-tent approach we've taken with our election work."
Eisen said Luttig and Gertner were instrumental in helping recruit dozens of former judges with bipartisan credentials to file amicus briefs on multiple matters including an August one to the supreme court opposing Trump's 2026 executive order to curb mail voting.
For its part, the WLG this summer hired about half a dozen new lawyers to handle election-related litigation. "As the midterms approach with growing concerns about potential federal interference in elections, we've brought on more attorneys to be even more prepared to litigate sensitive matters under acute time pressure," said James Pearce, a principal with the WLG.
Elsewhere, Sophia Lin Lakin, who leads the ACLU Voting Rights Project, said the group had been "pushing back" on administration efforts to seize personal voting data from states, and said the ACLU has been involved in 26 of 30 legal challenges to the administration on the issue. To date, the administration has lost 23 cases where rulings have been made.
Critics say Trump, the DoJ, the USPS and the Department of Homeland Security seem to be laying the groundwork for further attacks on the nation's election rules, citing Trump's false claims about election fraud and his radical plans to change voting rules.
In July in a televised speech, Trump falsely portrayed the nation's voting system as riddled with fraud and condemned voting by mail and non-citizen voting. "Mail-in ballots are inherently corrupt," Trump claimed without evidence, even though he voted twice by mail this year.
Trump, who continues to blame voting fraud for his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, also charged that non-citizen voting, which is illegal and historically minuscule, poses a "crisis of election security". Trump's fixation on noncitizen voting is belied by a database from the rightwing Heritage Foundation that only cites 100 cases over a quarter-century.
But according to documents reviewed by the New York Times, hundreds of DHS agents have been engaged in a hunt to find noncitizens among registered voters. The chief of the DHS has said ICE agents could be sent to polling places "if there is a threat to that polling place or we're serving a warrant".
The DoJ has helped to amplify Trump's bogus election claims with legal threats and actions.
In July, Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the department's civil rights division, wrote to officials in 50 states warning that "any election officer, including the chief election officer of the state, who knowingly retains noncitizens on the state's [voter list] or facilitates noncitizens in receiving and casting ballots could be subject to criminal liability".
In August, the DoJ announced plans to send a larger-than-usual contingent of 1,000 lawyers to monitor voting nationwide, raising concerns that such large efforts could lead to voter intimidation.
And in a harbinger of coming legal fights, Trump announced on his Truth Social platform last month that the DoJ's Ed Martin, a key election denialist in charge of pardons, was leaving to handle election-related litigation.
Former DoJ lawyers say administration threats to voting rights make opposition from legal advocates crucial.
Stacey Young, a lawyer who left the department at the start of 2025 after 18 years to found Justice Connection, a group of more than 3,000 ex-DoJ lawyers and other alumni, denounced Trump's moves "to interfere" with elections.
"The constitution makes clear that the president has no authority over the administration of our elections, but that hasn't stopped this president, or those he put in power at the justice department, from trying to interfere," Young said in a statement. "We're taking these threats seriously and leveraging our collective strengths to protect election integrity, which is key to maintaining a functioning democracy."
Justice Connection is working with experts in its alumni network to engage with the media, Congress and the public to highlight the justice department's traditional role in election security and ensuring compliance with federal voting laws.
Other DoJ alumni agree that opposition to Trump's election agenda is critical.
"These organizations are doing critical work in protecting the ability of people to vote and make their voices heard – a cornerstone of democracy," said Michael Bromwich, a former DoJ inspector general. "The full-out assault on democracy must be addressed through the courts because Congress has proven itself unwilling and unable to check the undemocratic steps taken by the administration."
Barbara McQuade, a former US attorney for eastern Michigan who now teaches law at the University of Michigan, said: "Large law firms sent armies of young attorneys to our nation's airports to represent individuals caught up in Trump's travel ban. That is not happening any more because of the 'deals' they negotiated with the Trump administration in his second term to support his pet causes.
"Thank goodness for groups like the Democracy Defenders Fund, which are attracting top legal talent and challenging some of Trump's lawless activities. Their work is protecting the rights of all Americans."
Further, Nick Brown, Washington state's attorney general, who chairs an election protection group for the Democratic Attorneys General Association, said it has teamed up with some legal advocacy groups such as the Brennan Center, States United and the DDF to hold "strategy sessions" to prepare for potential disruptive moves by the Trump administration in the November elections.
Brown also attacked the administration's appeal to the supreme court to move forward with Trump's executive order on voting by mail, despite Judge Talwani's strong concerns and Daga's litigation against it.
He said: "As the court said, states' compliance with this illegal order would be 'practically impossible' before the November elections given the unprecedented demands it would put on state and local elections officials. The chaos that would cause is exactly what Trump wants. That's why we continue to fight for a fair and properly administered election."
Baldwin too raised strong concerns about the DoJ's push to get the supreme court to issue a ruling that would expedite Trump's executive order on voting by mail.
She said: "The DoJ's slapdash effort at getting the supreme court's blessing to turn the USPS into a gatekeeper for mail would be a farce, if it didn't put our fundamental right to vote in the crosshairs. Given the importance of what is at stake, the DoJ's continued efforts are nothing more than an attempt to foist chaos on the electoral process. But they will fail."
Other lawyers engaged in key election legal battles and other litigation voice optimism they will prevail.
Tianna Mays, the legal director of the DDF, said: "The Trump administration has declared war on the rule of law, yet our democratic guardrails are still holding. We refuse to stand by idly while this administration flouts the constitution and attempts to eviscerate our institutions."