At a glance
The DOJ asserted states can purge voters right before elections, while the Postal Service won't deliver mail ballots unless states surrender voter lists to the federal government. Election experts say the plan would effectively kill vote-by-mail.
The DOJ and Postal Service are moving in tandem on a direct swap: states want to run mail voting, they hand over their full voter rolls to the federal government. The USPS won't deliver mail ballots without it. The DOJ separately argued states can purge voter registries right before elections—meaning a state could theoretically remove someone from the rolls days before they try to vote by mail. Election experts are blunt that this combination effectively ends mail voting as a viable option for most people.
This isn't about election security theater. The moves target mail voting specifically because it expanded dramatically after 2020 and skews toward voters the administration views as opposition. Demanding voter data in exchange for ballot delivery is coercion, not policy. A state that refuses gets no federal cooperation on mail balloting—which means it either goes back to in-person-only voting or faces federal interference in its election administration. The precedent here is that the federal government can now extract concessions from states using ballot access as leverage.
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