President Donald Trump has long foreshadowed an intended power grab to avoid losing control of Congress in the 2026 midterms, one that he will implement in part by restricting mail-in voting through the Postal Service. Now, a new report reveals that voters are fighting back against Trump’s war on mail-in voting.
“A coalition of pro-voting organizations is asking a federal court to stop the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) from finalizing a rule restricting mail-in voting this week,” reported Democracy Docket’s Brentin Mock on Sunday. “On Saturday night, the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts (LWVMA) and other civic and civil rights organizations filed an emergency motion to have a U.S. District Court enforce its injunction against the USPS’s plans to execute part of President Donald Trump’s executive order against mail voting.”
Mock added, “The postal service announced a final rule Friday night to implement those plans, stating they will immediately go into effect should that injunction — and another currently blocking it — be lifted by the U.S. Supreme Court. However, on Aug. 11, U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani ruled that the postal service needed to cease those plans, including any measures involving ‘refusing to transmit mail-in or absentee ballots; or otherwise initiating or completing rulemaking to promulgate the specific regulations outlined in’ Trump’s executive order.”
The journalist further pointed out that “the USPS’s Friday night announcement, which will be officially published on Aug. 26, is the agency’s promulgation of that rule, with a retroactively listed effective date of Aug. 21. The postal service said it needed to date it as such to ensure it could be rolled out in time for November’s midterm elections.”
Speaker to AlterNet in June, Susannah Goodman, Policy Director in the Voting and Fair Representation Program for the nonprofit Common Cause — said that some of Trump’s attempts to meddle in the midterms could be illegal.
“The other thing is that, as you well know, the administration has been trying to compel states to turn their voter rolls over to the federal government and to consolidate all of that in a mega database,” Goodman told AlterNet. “A number of states have refused to turn over their unredacted voter rolls with personal identifying information — Social Security numbers, driver’s licenses, et cetera. Common Cause and our partners have intervened in, I think, 17 of those cases on behalf of voters.”
She added that there has not been a single case “when the state has resisted and claimed they are not going to turn these voter rolls over, the court has dismissed the case or compelled the states to turn them over. The government has not had a compelling reason, and the states have won. So when states fight back, they win. We have been involved in that litigation. That is another huge power grab by the administration. It is also an illegal power grab, and when we have pushed back, we have won.”