Mail-In-Voting: Appeals Court Hands Trump Big Win

In March of 2026 President Trump issued Executive Order 14399, “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections,” directing the U.S. Postal Service to create a rule whereby any state that intends to send mail-in ballots to voters must provide a list of those eligible to participate in federal elections or the USPS “shall not transmit” those ballots. The obvious goal of the EO is to keep ballots from reaching people who are not eligible to vote. This predictably produced several lawsuits. On Friday, however, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a temporary stay on a lower court injunction that had the effect of permitting the U.S. Postal Service to move forward with the proposed mail-in ballot rule.

The court’s order does not resolve the underlying lawsuits but permits the USPS to move forward while the case is reviewed. “This ruling is a win for election integrity and would have significant implications for states like California that refuse to submit their voter rolls to verify compliance with federal election laws,” said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli. California is not the only state that refuses to allow its voter rolls to be audited. Every “blue” state in the nation is actively flouting the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA), both of which require all states to conduct voter roll maintenance.

Curiously, most states with GOP governing trifectas — those with Republican governors and legislatures — have been transparent with the Department of Justice concerning their voter rolls. An NBC report grudgingly admits that Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, Ohio, Indiana, Texas, Alaska, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, South Carolina, Florida, Missouri, Kansas and Montana are all cooperating. Meanwhile, the remaining red states are negotiating with the DOJ. The Democrat-controlled states are all fighting to hide their voter rolls. California is leading the resistance, and it is little wonder. Its management of mail-in ballots in the 2022 midterms was utterly chaotic. As the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) phrases it:

After accounting for polling place votes and rejected ballots in November 2022, there were more than 10 million ballots left outstanding, meaning election officials do not know what happened to them. It is fair to assume that the bulk of these were ignored or ultimately thrown out by the intended recipients. But, under mass mail elections, we can only assume what happened. Mail voting practices have an insurmountable information gap. The public cannot know how many ballots were disregarded, delivered to wrong mailboxes, or even withheld from the proper recipient.