After the US supreme court halted Donald Trump’s efforts to make it significantly harder to vote by mail in the midterms, US election officials are redoubling their efforts to convince Americans it is safe to cast their ballots by mail.
The supreme court’s Monday ruling, which sent Trump into an angry froth on Truth Social, averted what election officials of both parties said would be an administrative disaster for this year’s elections. Trump’s order would have required states to comply with cumbersome new rules, including redesigning mail-in envelopes and uploading lists of voters to the USPS, that were not feasible to implement before ballots started going out. The effort was seen as a push by the government to change voting policy as well as one to weaken confidence in voting by mail.
“That is the whole intent of the president. He wanted to build doubt,” said Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat who serves as the top election official in Nevada, where mail-in voting is widely used. “He wanted to create chaos.”
Twenty-nine percent of Americans voted by mail in the ۲۰۲۴ presidential election and roughly one third cast a mail-in ballot in the ۲۰۲۲ midterms, according to researchers at the MIT election lab. Democrats were more likely than Republicans to cast a mail-in ballot.
“There’s just concern: ‘Can we trust the mail?’ And I say yes, because it’s not the leadership or the management of the postal service that’s actually going to have their hands on the ballots, it’s the postal workers who are on our side,” Aguilar said. Nevada officials also plan to run a series of public service announcements to educate voters on the election process.
In Wisconsin, election officials have faced questions about voters concerned their ballots won’t be delivered in time. Wisconsin law requires mail-in ballots to be delivered by the close of polls on election day in order to count and in the state’s April election there was an increase in late-arriving ballots. There have been higher rates of late-arriving ballots tossed this year, according to an analysis by the New York Times.
Wisconsin election officials have encouraged people through county websites, social media, and notes attached to their ballots, among other things, to mail their ballots back sooner, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
“We’re really trying to encourage people to act sooner. So hopefully they take that to heart,” said Ann Jacobs, a Democrat on the Wisconsin elections commission, which oversees voting in that state. “It’s hard to tell people, ‘No, really, you should trust the post office’ when they came up with this absolutely cockamamie rule that was going to eliminate absentee voting.”
In a video released on Tuesday, Meagan Wolfe, the administrator of the Wisconsin elections commission, said: “If you’re going to be returning your ballot by mail, please do so at least two weeks before the election. And you also may want to contact your municipal clerk to find out if there are other opportunities for you to return your ballot in your community. You may have drop-boxes or you may be able to return your ballot in person to your clerk.”
In Washington state, where everyone received a mail-in ballot, more than ۲۰,۰۰۰ votes were rejected in the August primary because they arrived late at an election office.
“There is a sense of distrust,” said Steve Hobbs, the Washington secretary of state. “Even though there is a victory in the courts, we still are urging our voters to put their ballot in a drop-box.”
As lawsuits challenging the rule wound their way through federal courts this year, Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s secretary of state, publicly emphasized that the rule had not gone into effect yet and so that nothing around voting by mail had changed. Since the supreme court’s ruling preserved that status quo, he said, officials haven’t had to shift their messaging.
While voters have raised questions about the proposed changes “we continue to tell them until there’s a change, there is no change,” said Fontes, a Democrat “We are still where we were. We never jumped on the paranoia bandwagon.”
“It’s intentionally damaging to the entire elections administration process in this country,” said Fontes, a Democrat and the top election official in a state where voting by mail is widely used. “The administration, by their actions, have proven that they are hell-bent on driving American voters away from their own elections. And we’ve been working very hard to counter that.”
