Across the country, state election officials are waiting to discover if federal courts will allow the Trump administration’s restrictions on mail-in voting to take effect.
In Idaho, like many other states, election officials are nervous the changes might come too close to the 2026 midterm elections, which are less than two months away on Nov. 3.
The changes — proposed in a new U.S. Postal Service rule that implements an executive order by President Donald Trump — would require federal review of the design of absentee ballots and impose new rules on the design of envelopes containing absentee ballots, among other things.
“In the moment, the biggest concern … is just we’re so close to the election,” Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane, the state’s top election official and an elected Republican, said in an interview last week. “There’s the practical implications of getting absentee ballots out.”
McGrane said he isn’t sure that Idaho or other states would be able to fully comply with the USPS rule if it takes effect before this year’s election. He said county clerks across Idaho, who run the state’s elections, are busy finalizing ballots to print and mail out absentee ballots to military and overseas voters by Sept. 19.
In Idaho’s largest county, Ada — which is home to Boise — election officials have told the state they need to know about any changes to ballots by Wednesday in order to make changes before they print the ballots, said Trent Tripple, the Republican elected county clerk for Ada County. He said he also worries about making big changes months before the election.
“If you want the most secure election possible, do not put artificial timelines and make us change things at the last second,” he said in an interview. “If you’re doing that, I guarantee you there will be mistakes that are made — because we don’t have the time. We can’t back up an election.”
And that’s all on top of other potential ballot changes facing Idaho election officials as the Idaho Supreme Court weighs a lawsuit by the organizers of Proposition 1, an abortion legalization ballot initiative, that challenges state officials’ descriptions of the initiative.
Absentee ballot restrictions are the latest attempt at federal intervention in elections
The Trump administration’s policies seek to regulate absentee voting, a type of voting that allows voters to vote early or by mail.
About 15% of Idaho voters use absentee voting primarily, ranging from seniors to people who use it for its ease of access, McGrane said. In Idaho’s primary election in May, more than 46,000 voters cast absentee ballots, according to the state’s tally. That was mostly Republicans, which made up nearly 32,000 of absentee voters, the state’s data shows. In the last general election, when winners are officially declared for public office, about 182,00 people voted by absentee ballots, according to state data from the 2024 election.
In Idaho, voters can request absentee ballots without needing to state a reason. But state lawmakers in recent years have tried to change that through legislation.
The attempted restrictions on absentee voting are one of several recent attempts by the Trump administration to clamp down on state voting processes. In one high-profile instance, a state government attorney representing McGrane sent the U.S. Department of Justice a stern letter warning the federal government to “stop threatening your friends” after the agency said it could prosecute local and state election officials who let noncitizens vote in federal elections.
This spring, the Justice Department sued McGrane and dozens of other secretaries of state for not turning over sensitive information on their states’ registered voters, including partial Social Security data.
For now, the USPS rule is blocked by a federal court. But McGrane said his office is closely watching the legal developments.
McGrane said he was likely more prepared than most to brace for all the changes in elections recently. He said his career in elections started in Ada County just after the 2000 election, amid a contentious recount of the presidential election in Florida that brought concerns over partially hole punched “hanging chads.”
“Some of the narratives are the exact same,” McGrane said. “Election security was a major concern back in the 2000s.”
What could the USPS rule change for Idaho?
Part of what the USPS rule would require is that absentee ballots all have trackable envelopes. McGrane said most counties already have tracking codes on envelopes of ballots that are headed to voters, but he said none have those trackers on the return to local election offices.
“We’re just trying to watch and trying to make sure too that we don’t have counties making massive changes that aren’t going to take effect, as well,” McGrane said. “There’s a cost component both in terms of time, but also dollars to the counties. That’s one of the things that we have to weigh through all this because we don’t want to be expending a huge amount of tax dollars for something that’s not taking place.”
Another change proposed in the USPS rule is to require that states upload data on which voters requested absentee ballots so the federal government can prove that they are registered voters. At a federal court hearing late last week, a Justice Department attorney couldn’t tell a judge whether a system to handle that data was operational yet, the Associated Press reported.
Triple said Ada County, with a larger budget and staff than others, has more ability to handle changes than other smaller counties. He said the county was already planning to add the trackable codes to envelopes in the future, so the county already adopted that change for this election cycle.
But Triple, who serves as president of the Idaho Association of County Recorders and Clerks, said that many county officials are “not excited about having to change a bunch of stuff financially as well as time constraints for the upcoming November election.”
He stressed that changing ballots isn’t a simple task. That’s because a resident’s specific address determines which taxing, legislative and congressional districts they live and vote in.
“We have hundreds of variations of our ballots,” Triple said. “And so it’s not just changing one ballot and then printing 300,000 of them. It’s changing hundreds and hundreds of ballot styles and proofing all of those ballot styles to make sure we got them all right before we then can go out and print them.”