CREW and former secretaries of state oppose USPS mail ballot restrictions

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) should abandon its proposed restrictions on mail in ballots, according to a comment filed by CREW and a bipartisan group of eight former secretaries of state from across the country: Kathy Boockvar, Mary Estill Buchanan, John Gale, Joan Anderson Growe, Phil Keisling, Miles Rapoport, Sam Reed and Ben Ysursa.

The executive branch plays no role in making election policy or regulating election administration—the Constitution explicitly leaves those responsibilities to the states and Congress. The “Proposed Rule: Ballot Mail for Federal Elections” therefore conflicts with the Constitution. Beyond that, it is bad policy that will make it harder for election administrators to do their jobs, runs the risk of potentially disenfranchising voters and increases the chance of catastrophic cyber attacks on critical election infrastructure.

A federal judge recently blocked the proposed rule, and the Trump administration is appealing.

The comment notes that although USPS may have authority to investigate voting/election crimes perpetrated via the mail, it is not authorized to regulate mail-in ballots, demand lists of mail-in and absentee voters from states or impose special obligations on states for sending/receiving ballot mail. 

The proposed rule is also problematic because it would require making significant changes to state election administration in the middle of ongoing elections without providing funding to do so. USPS would force state election administrators to immediately begin compiling lists of every single mail-in and absentee voter in the state as well as enrolling all of them in a new USPS “portal”—which is a herculean task and creates a massive target for election saboteurs. Alarmingly, if anything goes wrong with the portal it would bring mail voting across the country to a complete stop. The proposed rule appears to be an ill-conceived, unconstitutional power grab, which is legally indefensible and practically unsound. The USPS must abandon these plans once and for all.