USPS Stops Work on Mail-Ballot Citizenship Portal After Court Freeze

USPS Stops Work on Mail-Ballot Citizenship Portal After Court Freeze

Postmaster General David Steiner told the Associated Press on Thursday that the Postal Service has halted work on the computer system built to carry out President Donald Trump’s mail-ballot order. “There’s an injunction so we’re not doing anything,” Steiner said at Postal Service headquarters.

The comment is the first operational readout since the Supreme Court on Monday left a nationwide injunction in place and refused to let the administration enforce new mail-ballot handling rules before the Nov. 3 midterms. The unsigned order said the government was unlikely to succeed on its challenge to the lower-court block. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote separately that there was “at least a fair prospect” the final rule fell within Postal Service authority, but that applying it to this year’s elections would be arbitrary and capricious because state and local officials did not have enough time to implement it. A Wednesday memo to postal employees, obtained by AP, said the agency “will not be enforcing any of these new rules in the 2026 federal election.” “First and foremost, for Election Mail it is business as usual,” the memo said.

Trump’s March executive order directed federal agencies to compile state citizenship lists and feed them into a Postal Service portal. Under that design, the service would mail federal ballots only to voters cleared through the system. States were also to submit names, addresses, and unique barcodes on outbound and return envelopes. Steiner said he learned of the order about a month before it was signed and treated it as an implementation job, not a policy brief. He said he had planned to unveil the system around Sept. 15. He read “portions” of a whistleblower report that flagged the difficulty of standing up a national platform on that timeline and said he still trusted the people assigned to it. “I don’t get to decide what rules that are put on us that I decide to accept or not accept,” he told AP. “I looked at it more from the execution side.” He described the Postal Service as “an independent agency of the executive branch” and would not grade the Court. Trump did.

The legal fight is not finished. The Justice Department has already returned to the Court on related mail-ballot and SAVE-system questions. Solicitor General D. John Sauer has argued that states need a working federal citizenship check before November. Monday’s order means they will not get this particular Postal Service gate in time. Ordinary postmark and delivery questions remain. They do not replace the citizenship screen the White House wanted on the mail stream. The midterms are 46 days away. The portal that was supposed to be live this week is not.