USPS proposes ballot barcode and voter tracking rule

The U.S. Postal Service published a proposed rule on May 29, 2026, that would give the federal government direct visibility into who votes by mail and which ballots get delivered. The 20-page rule, posted online before its formal Federal Register publication on June 2, requires states to submit the names and addresses of every voter receiving a mail-in or absentee ballot to a new agency portal called the Federal Ballot Mail Portal. USPS would use that data to build state-specific Mail-In and Absentee Participation Lists.

The rule flows from 14399, which Trump signed March 31, 2026 and which directed the Postmaster General to begin a rulemaking within 60 days. Postmaster General David Steiner, appointed by the USPS Board of Governors in May 2025 to replace the departing Louis DeJoy, is now the federal official executing that directive.

Every ballot envelope — both the one mailed to the voter and the return envelope — would have to carry a unique USPS barcode under the proposed rule. That barcode would tie the physical piece of mail to an individual voter's identity in the federal portal. Legal experts say this creates a mechanism for the federal government to track whether specific voters returned their ballots, a level of voter-specific data collection that no federal agency has previously held.

The proposal also allows USPS to return outbound federal ballot mailings that don't carry proper barcodes or that aren't tied to a state-submitted voter list. That return authority is what Votebeat and voting rights lawyers called the most consequential provision: a state that doesn't cooperate with the new data requirements risks having ballots sent back rather than delivered.

The rule covers general, special, and runoff federal elections but explicitly excludes primaries and ballots sent to military and overseas voters under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. That carve-out means the rule would apply to the November 2026 midterm elections — less than six months after the comment period closes — but wouldn't govern the primary elections already underway in some states.

States would also have to submit voter lists at least 30 days before ballots go out under state law. For states with established early-ballot timelines, that 30-day lead time compresses the window election officials already have, adding a new federal pre-clearance step to a process states have historically run entirely themselves.

Eight states — California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington — automatically send mail ballots to all registered voters without requiring an individual request. These universal vote-by-mail states face the steepest compliance burden because their ballot lists cover every registered voter rather than only those who opted in. Oregon, Washington, and Colorado have conducted their elections almost entirely by mail for years, and their secretaries of state immediately signaled that the new federal data requirements would disrupt systems built over decades.

Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said his office received no advance communication from USPS about the rule. He told reporters: "This change in policy was pretty dramatic. It affects our vote-by-mail system here in the state of Washington and I don't know why, but they did not communicate with us nor work with us on the issue."

Roughly one in three Americans — about 48 million voters — cast mail ballots in the 2024 general election, representing 30 percent of total turnout. That number dropped from 43 percent in 2020 but still represents the largest single-election mail-ballot count in U.S. history outside the pandemic peak. The 2026 midterm electorate will be smaller, but mail voting is more common in midterms among older and high-propensity voters — the demographic most likely to be affected if states struggle to comply.

Sen. Alex Padilla, a Democrat who previously served as California's secretary of state, put the stakes directly: "Tens of millions of eligible voters could be prevented from voting by mail if states do not fully submit to this new federal mandate being rushed ahead of the 2026 election."

The proposed rule is an exercise in under the . Federal agencies must publish a proposed rule in the Federal Register, accept public comments for at least 30 days, and then issue a final rule that responds to those comments before it can take effect. With the Federal Register publication set for June 2, 2026, the comment deadline lands around July 2, leaving USPS a very short window to finalize the rule, incorporate responses, and publish a final version before the November 2026 general election cycle begins.

The Cato Institute's election policy analyst noted that USPS would have two months or less from when the final rule takes effect to when it needs to oversee its first federal mail ballots — calling the timeline 'very tight' and questioning whether the infrastructure states have built over many years can be reproduced by USPS in a matter of months.

One day before USPS published the proposed rule, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols — a Trump appointee based in Washington, D.C. — declined on May 28, 2026, to issue a preliminary injunction against Executive Order 14399. Nichols found the case not yet ripe: because USPS and DHS hadn't yet taken concrete steps to implement the order, he wrote, plaintiffs couldn't yet show they'd been harmed. He left the door open for plaintiffs to return once implementation began.

The USPS proposed rule published the next day may satisfy that ripeness requirement. Democracy Docket, which tracks voting-rights litigation, noted that the new rule is exactly the kind of concrete agency action Nichols said he needed to see before courts could intervene.

A separate case before U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani — an Obama appointee sitting in Boston — has a hearing scheduled for June 2, 2026. That case is led by Massachusetts AG Andrea Joy Campbell, who co-leads a 24-state coalition challenging EO 14399. Oregon AG Dan Rayfield and California AG Rob Bonta also filed separate but aligned lawsuits. The coalition argues that the executive order violates the of the Constitution, which gives states primary authority over election administration, and that it conflicts with the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, which established USPS as an independent establishment of the executive branch.

The Brennan Center for Justice filed a separate federal lawsuit, League of Women Voters of Massachusetts v. Trump, on April 2, 2026, arguing the order is unconstitutional. The center also documented that the Justice Department's security measures for collected voter rolls are inadequate — a concern that extends directly to the USPS portal the new rule would create.

Privacy advocates focus on what happens to the voter-barcode database after elections are over. The proposed rule doesn't specify data-retention limits, deletion schedules, or access controls for the Federal Ballot Mail Portal. Under the rule, USPS would hold individually identifiable records linking specific voters to specific ballot envelopes for every covered federal election — a national voter-tracking database with no parallel in U.S. election history.

Legal experts warn that errors in state voter lists or federal databases could cause eligible voters to be denied ballots if their names don't appear correctly in the portal. States with large populations of recently moved residents, new citizens, or voters with non-standard names in legacy systems face the highest error risk — disproportionately affecting communities of color, younger voters, and low-income voters who move more frequently.

The USPS proposed rule is distinct from two other federal voting requirements that exist in parallel. The National Voter Registration Act governs how states maintain voter rolls, and the Help America Vote Act sets baseline standards for provisional ballots. Neither law gives USPS authority over ballot delivery decisions. Critics — including former election officials — say the proposed rule effectively turns a mail carrier into an eligibility gatekeeper, a role Congress never assigned to the postal service and that the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 doesn't authorize.

The Bipartisan Policy Center noted that the executive order's scope was unprecedented: prior administrations had never directed USPS to assume a decision-making role in ballot delivery. The public comment period, which closes around July 2, is the formal mechanism through which election officials, voters, advocacy groups, and state governments can put their legal and operational objections on the record before a final rule is issued.