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.
That is why Democrats like Gov. Newsom object to it. They see accurate, efficient, and timely delivery of mail-in ballots as a very real threat.
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.
Consequently, when President Trump announced that he would “lead a movement” to curtail mail-in voting, California Gov. Gavin Newsom brayed, “Trump openly admits he wants to rig elections by killing mail-in voting! In California, we’re doing the OPPOSITE — bringing oversight, accountability, and protecting every voter’s voice!” This kind of bluster ignores the inconvenient fact that the first president to warn us about the risks of mail-in voting was the late Jimmy Carter. The nonpartisan 2005 Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by former President Carter and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, highlighted among its various findings that “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”
This finding was meant to be a warning, but it is difficult to escape the impression that the Democrats took it as an invitation. Not long after the Carter-Baker Commission released its findings, the Democrats began pushing hard to implement universal mail-in voting at the state level. Now, according to Ballotpedia, eight states have all mail elections — California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington: “In these states, voting is conducted primarily by mail, and all eligible voters receive a ballot by default.” All of these states are now one-party fiefdoms. But that word “eligible” is where the USPS comes in. As Don Palmer, Senior Legal Fellow for Election Integrity at the Heritage Foundation, explains:
One of the unique features of the proposed rule is a “Mail-In and Absentee Participation List” for each state. It suggests a pre-mailing notice to USPS from each state’s chief election official, listing the voters to be included on the official mailing list and the unique barcode associated with each voter. The underlying goal: to strengthen the integrity of the process by showing the number of ballots sent and returned by Election Day. This allows a preliminary reconciliation of ballots to identify whether more ballots are returned to election officials than were sent to voters.
This will prevent the kind of debacle that occurred in California four years ago. The critics of this rule complain that all of this would significantly expand the USPS role in elections. This is nonsense. As Palmer points out, “USPS is already significantly involved in elections because of its handling of millions of ballots. As a result, the federal government now has a significant national interest in uniform standards that promote accurate, efficient, and timely delivery of mail-in ballots in federal elections.” That is why Democrats like Gov. Newsom object to it. They see accurate, efficient, and timely delivery of mail-in ballots as a very real threat. And they are right. It’s why he and his accomplices keep so many flying monkeys on retainer.
They must be ready to descend on any court like the DC Circuit Court of Appeals that rules according to the law. In Friday’s ruling, the appeals court said the Trump administration is “likely to succeed” because one lawsuit is premature. The court also said the Trump administration “demonstrated they would be irreparably harmed” if the Postal Service can’t finalize and implement the rule in time for the midterms. On the other hand, as Charles Dickens put it, “The law is an ass.” So, no one with any sense would predict the final outcome.
READ MORE from David Catron:
Carville’s Presidential History Lesson
