For almost a decade, Kelsi Kiper has relied on the U.S. Postal Service to cast her ballots as a voter registered in Texas but stationed out of state with her husband, an active-duty service member.
This year, though, to make sure her voice is heard, she's making a backup plan.
Kiper hopes she'll be able to exercise her voting rights by mail for this year's midterm general election. But she recently started considering spending around $2,000 to book flights and rental cars so she can vote in person.
"It's not something that I think a lot of us in the military are prepared to spend because many military families operate on a single income," Kiper said. "For me, I think that it's important to prioritize the rights that our active-duty members are serving to preserve."
The ongoing legal fight over a Postal Service plan for President Trump's attempt to exert control over federal elections is forcing millions of other eligible voters to navigate the uncertainty with voting by mail for the midterms.
For now, USPS is expected to handle election mail as usual. North Carolina and parts of Wisconsin have already started sending out absentee ballots for the general election.
That's because U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani has blocked USPS from refusing to deliver ballots to voters in states where election officials do not turn over voter lists to the mailing agency and do not have certain specific barcodes on their ballot envelopes.
But the Trump administration has asked the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court to allow those new federal mail ballot requirements for the midterms.
Rulings from those courts may come as soon as this week. They could unleash a major upheaval to voting by mail, which was how about 1 in 3 voters cast ballots in the last two federal elections.
In her latest ruling against the USPS plan, Judge Talwani warned that other states gearing up to mail out their ballots later this month are "unable to pivot this late in the election cycle, nearly guaranteeing significant disenfranchisement for eligible voters."
Election officials warn of "confusion and chaos" if USPS plan moves ahead
The Postal Service has defended its revised mail ballot rule as "modest data and mail preparation requirements." USPS has also highlighted what it considers the rule's "visibility and law-enforcement benefits," echoing Trump's use of illegal voting by non-U.S. citizens — an incredibly rare problem — to justify the executive order that prompted the USPS plan.
But Talwani, a nominee of former President Barack Obama, concluded that the plan is a likely illegal effort by a mailing agency that has no authority to control voting by mail.
In both of her rulings against USPS, the judge noted Trump administration lawyers have provided no evidence of mail-voting fraud to support a rush to carry out new ballot requirements for this year's midterms.
Instead, election officials around the country have offered one sworn statement after another about possible massive disruptions to voting.
"It would be virtually impossible for Wisconsin to comply," Don Millis, the Republican-appointed chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said in a sworn declaration supporting the lawsuit that two dozen mainly Democratic-led states, plus Washington, D.C., brought against the USPS plan.
There's not enough time or money to reprint ballot envelopes in time for the state's Sept. 17 deadline for mailing out absentee ballots for all requests received by then, Millis added. To meet USPS' new requirement for specific envelope barcodes, election officials in Wisconsin would need to print stickers and add them by hand — which Millis described as "an impossibility for many jurisdictions," including small, rural communities that "often have a single employee performing all elections-related work."
In many Western states, redoing ballot envelopes would only be part of the problem.
"Because Washington's elections are designed as primarily vote-by-mail, and have long operated this way," Stuart Holmes, the state's elections director, explained in a court filing, the state "no longer has large-scale election-day infrastructure in place to accommodate a significant shift away from vote-by-mail."
The overwhelming majority of voters in Hawaii also count on USPS to receive their ballots, and Scott Nago, the state's chief election officer, said there is "simply insufficient time to coordinate the necessary polling places, volunteers, and logistical framework that would be necessary to emulate the prior polling place model that existed prior to the advent of elections by mail."
Dena Dawson, the elections director for Oregon — a fully vote-by-mail state since 2000 — warned: "If technological or implementation failure prevents the delivery of mail ballots in this vote-by-mail state, Oregonians have no other means by which to cast their votes."
Last week, a whistleblower report claimed the Postal Service's new systems for enforcing its ballot requirements have not been properly tested and could lead to many eligible voters not getting their ballots in time for the midterms or at all. The USPS inspector general's office has started an independent review of those allegations, spokesperson Tara Linne confirmed in a statement.
In response to the report, Postmaster General David Steiner said USPS is taking the whistleblower's concerns "seriously" and that the agency's "standards for quality, security, and system integrity were not compromised" during the "accelerated" development of the new systems.
Still, USPS has only been able to confirm that there would be a rollout "sometime" this week of the online portal system state election officials would need to use to turn over their voter lists.
"Whenever we have change in the system close to an election, it has the potential to create confusion and chaos," explained Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer for the National Association of Election Officials. "And let's be honest: There are some people that want nothing more than for our elections to be perceived as chaotic or for voters to not understand what their rights are and what the rules of engagement are in order for them to effectively participate."
In North Carolina, which began mailing out absentee ballots on Sept. 4, local election officials are making do with the uncertainty.
Corinne Duncan, elections director for Buncombe County in western North Carolina, has been getting more questions from local voters about mail-in voting and the Postal Service at outreach events, where she says she's reminding people to get their absentee ballots in the mail as soon as possible.
"We're always working on contingency planning and making our system as adjustable as possible because it is truly non-negotiable. We will make that election happen," Duncan added. "I think we proved that in the COVID-19 times. Recently for us in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, we made that election happen, too. So change happens, but we're going to vote."
Derek Bowens, elections director for North Carolina's Durham County, says his office has also been "pressure tested."
"We still stand firm that we'll be able to get these ballots out to voters with enough time for them to review, make their decisions and return them back to our office," Bowens said.
Still, Patrick of the National Association of Election Officials says she's concerned about the extra strain put on the officials and workers who have been preparing for months to hold this year's elections.
"While I believe that election officials at the end of the day are going to do their best to do whatever it is the courts tell them need to be done or the laws tell them need to be done, we shouldn't continually ask them to make the most out of very difficult situations, particularly with limited resources," Patrick said.
Some of the most vulnerable voters are at risk of disenfranchisement under the USPS plan
In states that can offer alternatives to mail-in voting, many eligible voters may be unable to cast a ballot in person — including disabled voters, out-of-state college students, voters who need language assistance that is not available at polling places, and even some poll workers who will be too busy to vote on Election Day.
The ballots of overseas and military voters covered by the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act are not supposed to be affected by the USPS plan. The Postal Service says it will deliver those voters' ballots as usual.
But Kelsi Kiper and others fear that any complications in enforcing the new ballot requirements for other types of ballots could have knock-on effects.
"I'm just concerned that there will be a hiccup or there might be a barrier in place for me," Kiper says.
Ann Madden, a board member of the Association of Americans Resident Overseas, a challenger to the USPS plan, predicted the mail ballot rule is "just going to make a bad situation worse." The ballot Madden sent from France for Pennsylvania's primary arrived too late to be counted this year.
For the general election, Madden said she considered getting on an airplane to fly across the Atlantic Ocean to vote in person.
"I can't travel at that time for other personal reasons," Madden said. "My intention, frankly, is to try the FedEx route or one of the [other] private postal services."
For Sarah Streyder — executive director of Secure Families Initiative, an advocacy group for military families that is also suing over the USPS plan — a major concern is that when many military voters register to vote, they do not identify themselves as UOCAVA-covered voters.
Even with that exemption, if the USPS plan goes fully into effect, Streyder is worried many service members and their family members who register correctly with a state registration form for civilian voters will get their ballots caught up in delays.
"Imagine someone on a submarine. It might be that they only get a port call with maybe days before the election happens," Streyder said. "If a USPS list lags at all and doesn't have that person's name on the list at the moment in which they're casting their ballot, and it's their one chance to do so because they're going back underwater after that, that person won't have a voice."
Editor's note: USPS is a financial supporter of NPR.
Edited by Megan Pratz
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