Editor's Note: This essay is part of the Democracy Project's Elections 2026 series.

Threats to the 2026 general election include the possibility of interference at the polls by Justice Department monitors, or by armed federal law enforcement agents or troops in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 592, and seizure of ballots or voting equipment after election day. However, at this writing, the most immediate threat looming over the 2026 general elections is the new rule under which the U.S. Postal Service will not accept outgoing mail-in ballots unless they satisfy requirements that are unfeasible for election administrators to meet in time for this election.

In the U.S., elections are administered mostly at the county or municipal level by boards of elections, clerks, or other officers or commissions. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to them all as boards of elections.

The new USPS rule was promulgated on August 21 of this year. It requires boards of elections to:

• send mail-in ballots in envelopes that meet USPS design standards for ballot mailings, including a unique bar-code identifier for each voter;

• provide to mail-in voters ballot-return envelopes meeting the same design standards, with another unique bar-code identifier;

• submit their envelope designs in advance for USPS review and approval;

• upload to an as-yet-unavailable online portal a list containing information about each voter, including name, address, and unique bar-code identifier, before mailing the ballots;

• deliver the outgoing ballots to a post office and wait while all ballot mailing envelopes are scanned to determine whether they match the information that was uploaded to the portal;

• update the list on the portal before additional ballots are sent out; and

• provide replacement ballot-return envelopes to voters who lose or damage their ballot-return envelopes.

Enforcement of the rule has been preliminarily enjoined. The Department of Justice has applied to the Supreme Court to stay the preliminary injunction so that USPS can begin enforcing the rule. If the stay is granted, the election will be disrupted, as many boards will be unable to mail out ballots when required by state law or perhaps even soon enough for the ballots to be returned timely.

About half the states require boards of elections to start sending mail-in ballots by or (mostly) before September 29. Several others have deadlines within the following week.

Envelope designs: Some boards already have envelope designs that should satisfy the USPS design requirements, but many do not. The latter boards will have to create new envelope designs. All boards will have to submit their envelopes to USPS for review. It is unknown how long it will take USPS to complete its review of these thousands of envelopes. After their envelope designs are approved, boards with new designs will need to have envelopes printed. This, too, will take time and likely will tax the capacity of the firms to which boards outsource such printing. Then the ballots will need to be transported to each board.

Unique bar-code identifiers: Some boards already have the capacity to generate unique bar-codes for each voter, but many do not. Even those that do will have to make sure that the bar-codes meet the new standards that are to be set by USPS. Those boards that do not already have the capacity to generate the bar-codes will have to acquire it, which will take time and entail significant unanticipated expense.

Exporting the data required for the portal: The format in which the required voter information must be uploaded to the portal is not yet known. Once USPS releases those specifications, the voter registration database vendors will have to program their software to generate the data files in the specified format and train the staff to use this new feature at every board they serve.

Uploading data to the portal: Whenever the portal becomes available, boards will have to be authorized to use it by their state’s chief election officer, obtain login credentials, learn how to use it, and train their staff.

Printing and stuffing outgoing ballot envelopes: The next step is to print the voter’s name, address, and unique bar-code on each outgoing mailing envelope. Unique bar-codes must also be printed on the return envelopes. Many boards do not have the technology to print such bar-codes, and it is far too late for them to acquire it before they must send out ballots for this election. They would need to outsource that printing to an approved vendor, of which the number is limited. That, too, takes time, and those vendors’ peak capacities are likely to be exceeded. After the voters’ names, addresses, and bar-codes are printed on the envelopes, the envelopes must be stuffed with the ballots, return envelopes, and instructions. Much care must be taken to ensure that each voter is sent the correct ballot and (now) the correct return envelope bearing that voter’s unique bar-code. This process takes time and must begin well before the state’s deadline for sending out the ballots.

Mailing: Next comes the mailing. Board employees will take – depending on how populous the jurisdiction is – hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of ballots to the post office, where each envelope will be scanned to determine whether the voter information on the envelope matches that in the data file the board previously uploaded to the portal. The rule requires board personnel to wait until that process is completed. USPS has said that could take up to one minute per envelope. If it takes even half that long on average, a relatively small mailing of 1,000 ballots would take over eight hours; a mailing of 10,000 would take over 80 hours. Larger postal facilities might have multiple scanning stations, which would reduce the amount of time it takes, but many boards do not have access to such larger facilities, and those larger facilities are the ones that are likely to receive the largest mailings. The rule appears to require that the entire mailing be rejected by the post office if even one envelope is found to be non-compliant. It is unclear what would happen in that event. Would the post office identify each non-compliant envelope so that it could be segregated and the rest re-submitted (to be re-scanned)? We don’t know.

It should be borne in mind that in relatively unpopulous jurisdictions, board staffs are extremely small, sometimes just two or four full-time employees supplemented at peak times by a small number of seasonal employees, and the technological and other resources available to them are often quite limited. These tiny staffs must handle all aspects of election administration.

Election administrators strenuously resist implementing significant innovations –especially technological innovations – in general federal elections, and all the more so in the two or three months before election day. This is for good reason. The implementation of such changes rarely goes exactly according to plan. Things go wrong and need to be fixed. From an election administration perspective, being required to implement the new USPS rule beginning at some as-yet unknown date in September would be nothing short of insanity. From a legal perspective, it would amount to an unconstitutional federal executive-branch preemption of state laws regulating the manner in which federal elections are conducted – specifically, those state laws that set the date on which mail-in ballots must be sent to voters.