95 pages of chaos: The White House rules that nearly tanked the election

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White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles attends a dinner hosted by U.S. President Trump in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 2, 2026.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court blocked an executive order from President Donald Trump restricting voting by mail in ways that could have thrown the upcoming midterms into chaos. But the White House originally had far more disruptive plans, ProPublica has learned.

According to several people knowledgeable about the discussions, the administration initially floated an idea that would have virtually shut down mail voting: requiring all ballots to be delivered exclusively through certified mail. The proposal — which would have required voters to be home and sign for delivery of their ballots — was ultimately abandoned, after vehement Postal Service objections that it would have been impossible to execute.

Even after the idea fizzled, Postal Service officials were cut out of crucial conversations as the Trump administration moved forward with what became the final executive order, two people familiar with the matter said. Issued in March, its contents came as a shock even to the Postal Service’s lawyers.

Trump’s order would have forced postal workers to serve as gatekeepers, deciding which ballots would be delivered and which wouldn’t. Beyond that, it would have inexplicably handed authority over the plan’s execution to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who has no formal oversight over the Postal Service.

Inside the Postal Service, which is overseen by a bipartisan Board of Governors, deliberations on whether to comply with the order stretched on for weeks. Some board members found it alarming but feared Trump would respond to a direct challenge by trying to fire them, sources familiar with their concerns told ProPublica. Instead, they remained silent, counting on the courts to block the measure.

“The board was being careful how or when it took action, knowing that it might be its last action,” one source said.

ProPublica previously detailed postal officials’ deep concerns with the Trump order. Now our reporting reveals how the order came to be and who was involved in crafting it, as well as the extent to which the White House tried to dictate how mail-in ballots would be processed.

The White House team leading the mail-in voting discussions included J. Brian Sikma, a special presidential assistant who has been involved in other administration election initiatives, including identifying noncitizen voters for prosecution and seeking to ban voting machines. (Sikma didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

The commerce secretary, Lutnick, served in “an advisory and coordination capacity” in drafting the order, a department spokesperson confirmed to ProPublica.

“President Trump values Secretary Lutnick’s advice on many matters,” the spokesperson said.

In an emailed statement, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis denied the administration had interfered improperly with the Postal Service, an independent agency whose governance structure is specifically designed to protect it from political influence. She said the executive order “added important safeguards to vote-by-mail. These were commonsense measures to protect the security of mail-in ballots and to ensure only Americans vote in American elections.”

Bis also rejected the idea that the certified-mail proposal was “unworkable,” saying this played no part in the administration’s decision “to go in another direction.”

A Postal Service spokesperson declined to comment on the agency’s internal deliberations about the executive order and said it was the Board of Governors’ policy not to discuss them.

He referred ProPublica to an earlier statement by Postmaster General David Steiner that said: “Postal employees take great pride in their responsibility to support the democratic process. We will continue to approach that responsibility with the care, professionalism, and dedication that voters and election officials expect from the United States Postal Service.”

In an interview, Jonathan Smith, president of the American Postal Workers Union, called the Trump administration’s push to revamp mail voting problematic and baseless.

“The ultimate goal was to create chaos and doubt in the vote-by-mail process,” he said. “You’re creating a rule to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.”

The White House first reached out to the Postal Service in the fall of 2025, saying the administration wanted to explore how to improve mail voting.

Trump has long claimed without evidence that mail voting is riddled with fraud, though he frequently votes by mail himself. He’s said the process is “inherently corrupt” and contributed to his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.

Postal Service leaders responded to the administration’s late 2025 overture with recommendations they had been making to local election officials for years. Nearly a third of all ballots in the 2022 and 2024 elections were cast through the mail. Mostly, independent audits showed, the system worked reliably. But at times, ballots got lost or delayed.

Officials with the Postal Service had long wanted election offices to use standardized ballot envelopes with scannable barcodes, logos and other features that would make it easier to separate election mail from other first-class mail. In 2024, a bipartisan bill to turn those recommendations into requirements stalled in the Senate.

When Trump retook the Oval Office, it soon became obvious the White House had other ideas, including requiring ballots to be sent by certified mail.

Doing this could, in theory, erase some security concerns, but local governments would have to pay a higher fee to send each envelope and postal workers would have to conduct millions of identity checks, crippling timely delivery.

“It was just, for many reasons, a terrible idea,” one top Postal Service official said.

The White House backed down, but when the final order was unveiled, postal officials said they were surprised to see it demanded that they implement the envelope changes and ballot-tracking measures they’d recommended in time for the midterms.

The directive also required states to provide the Postal Service with lists of eligible mail voters, which workers would then try to match with ballots before sending them out. Designing a new ballot-tracking system would normally take about a year, postal officials said.

They were particularly concerned with the order’s requirement that Postal Service workers reject ballots for an array of reasons, ranging from outdated voter information to unscannable bar codes. All mail ballots from a state could be rejected if the state refused to provide its voter list.

“That’s not what we do,” a former official involved with the discussions said. “We deliver mail. We don’t decide what goes and what doesn’t.”

Postal Service officials were taken aback that the final order put Lutnick in charge of coordinating with other agencies and the postmaster general in “effectuating all relevant aspects of the implementation.”

Lutnick’s involvement came after Trump had discussed putting the Postal Service under the Commerce Department. At Lutnick’s February 2025 swearing-in, Trump said he thought Lutnick’s “great business instinct” was just what the Postal Service needed. (The postal board fought back, and Trump’s idea of merging the agency into the Commerce Department is apparently no longer on the table.)

Almost immediately after the executive order became public, four separate lawsuits challenging it were filed by states led by Democrats and political and civil rights groups. Democratic members of Congress and postal union leaders urged the Postal Service and its Board of Governors, which had long defended the agency’s independence, to resist. A June 2026 Supreme Court decision allowing Trump to remove leaders of many agencies long considered independent gave the governors pause, however.

Steiner, appointed at Trump’s behest in mid-2025, directed Postal Service leaders to prepare to implement the order. In public statements, he defended the measure and said he would leave it for the courts to decide. At his direction, postal officials began establishing procedures to comply with Trump’s order.

As they started to craft rules, career postal officials, concerned about voter privacy and disenfranchising legitimate voters, attempted to do as little as they could to comply, three people knowledgeable about their deliberations said. They looked for ways to protect workers from having to step out of their traditional lanes.

For example, they proposed having states turn over their voter lists but not requiring Postal Service workers to use them to decide which ballots to send out. When the Postal Service’s lawyer took the idea to the White House counsel, however, it was rebuffed as “not enough,” the former official said.

The White House team made clear that if even one ballot envelope in a batch mailing didn’t match the state list, the entire mailing should be rejected and election officials should be notified. “That means if four addresses don’t align in a mailing of one million, 999,996 other people don’t get their ballot tomorrow,” the former official said.

As ProPublica has reported, staffers found these issues highly troubling. A whistleblower complaint released in August warned that the system designed to carry out the executive order was rushed into being, untested and error-prone.

The final rule — 95 pages spelling out how the agency would carry out Trump’s order — was issued on Aug. 21, less than a month before the first mail ballots were due to go out.

It left many questions unanswered: How would lists of voters be kept updated? How would the Postal Service ensure local officials were able to upload voter information to the agency’s new portal? How could postal officials approve the new ballot envelope designs required by nearly 10,000 voting jurisdictions in just weeks?

“This was going to be a disaster,” the former postal official said.

The Sept. 14 Supreme Court ruling provided a reprieve, but Smith, the postal union president, criticized agency leadership for not stepping in more forcefully. Counting on the courts to halt the order, said Smith, was “a dangerous calculation, and showed a clear lack of courage and integrity.”

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