Who Holds the Pen?

Seven weeks before Election Day, the Supreme Court settled one question and left a bigger one wide open.

The settled question: the Trump administration's new mail-ballot rules will not apply to the 2026 midterms.

The open question is harder, and more honest: does the United States have a mail voting system that enough Americans — across the political spectrum — can genuinely trust?

That question has no clean answer yet. This is our attempt at a straight look at all sides of it.

The Constitution First — Because It Has to Be

No honest account of this story starts anywhere else.

Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 is the Elections Clause. It is the Constitution's governing text on who runs American elections:

Two sentences. A clear chain of authority.

States go first. They set the rules for how federal elections run within their borders. Congress goes second — it can pass a law overriding state rules when needed.

The President is not in this chain. Not mentioned once.

This is not a partisan reading. The Republican majority of the House Administration Committee publishes its own analysis of the Elections Clause. It says the states have "the primary authority over election administration" and gives Congress a secondary role. The clause names no role for the President.

A federal judge said it plainly in April 2025, in a preliminary injunction against an earlier Trump executive order on elections: "Our Constitution entrusts Congress and the States — not the President — with the authority to regulate federal elections." Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote it. President Clinton appointed her.

That is the foundation. Everything else in this story sits on top of it.

What Actually Happened

In March 2026, President Trump signed an executive order directing the U.S. Postal Service to implement new requirements for mail-in ballots in federal elections. USPS issued its final rule in August.

The rule required states to redesign ballot envelopes with an election-mail logo and a unique barcode tied to each voter. States would also have to submit voter names and addresses to a new federal USPS portal before ballots could enter the mail stream. A mailing that did not comply would be returned to the election office for correction.

USPS said the rule would not inspect ballot contents, determine voter eligibility, maintain voter rolls or count ballots. The administration called the measures modest. Critics called them unworkable. Both deserve a fair hearing.

Federal courts blocked the rule twice. On September 14, the Supreme Court declined to lift those blocks, in an unsigned order saying the government was "unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to the District Court's preliminary injunction." Justices Alito and Thomas publicly dissented. Justice Kavanaugh — a Trump appointee — voted with the majority but wrote separately that the rule has a fair prospect of being within the Postal Service's authority, just not implementable this close to an election.

That door stays open for 2028. This fight is not over.

The Elephant — Named, Not Re-Litigated

Before presenting either side of this debate, something needs to be said directly.

The 2020 presidential election produced dozens of lawsuits, plus audits and recounts in several states. Courts ruled. Officials certified. The election security councils that work with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — part of Trump's own administration at the time — called it "the most secure in American history."

No court changed the outcome in any state. The certifications stood.

And yet a significant number of Americans have not closed the book in their own minds. That is not nothing. That is the honest context for why this mail-ballot fight carries the weight it does. People who came out of 2020 with unresolved doubts are not wrong to want a system they can verify. People who came out of 2020 confident in the results are not wrong to push back on changes that feel more disruptive than protective.

We name 2020 here not to re-argue it, but because pretending it isn't the engine behind this debate would be dishonest. It is.

What the Data Actually Shows — Neutral Ground

Before either perspective gets its say, here is what the documented record shows. Readers can weigh it as they see fit.

The Brookings Institution — using the Heritage Foundation's own database of election fraud cases — found about four cases of mail voting fraud for every ten million mail votes cast, averaged across the 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022 general elections. A fraud rate of roughly 0.000043 percent.

Brookings is a center-left think tank. The Heritage Foundation is solidly conservative. Brookings built its number on Heritage's own data.

That figure counts people who were charged with election fraud — not allegations, not suspicions. It is a national average across four election cycles. Brookings is open about the limits: it describes the Heritage database as "not an exhaustive or comprehensive list of all election fraud in the states," and says it could not find the method behind it.

What the data does not settle: whether the current system is adequate going forward, whether public confidence requires more than a low fraud rate, or whether the specific rule proposed would have made things better or worse. The data is a fact. What to do with it is a policy question. Those are different things, and The Plumb Line Post treats them as such.

The Fraud Concern — Taken Seriously

A 2005 commission co-chaired by former President Jimmy Carter concluded that absentee ballots "remain the largest source of potential voter fraud" in the American system. That was a bipartisan commission. Carter was a Democrat.

Real cases exist in the record. A 2018 congressional race in North Carolina was thrown out and a new election ordered after evidence surfaced of a coordinated mail ballot collection scheme. Municipal elections in Miami in 1997 and Paterson, New Jersey in 2020 were invalidated for similar reasons. Individual prosecutions for mail ballot fraud appear across multiple states and both parties.

More than half of the states explicitly allow a third party to return another voter's completed ballot, according to a National Conference of State Legislatures tally reported by NBC in 2022. The practice is often called ballot harvesting. Supporters say it helps voters who struggle to reach drop boxes. Critics say it creates a chain-of-custody gap that other voting methods don't have. Both observations are fair.

The state-by-state variation in mail ballot rules is real and wide. Some states use signature verification and online tracking. Others use far less. No national standard exists.

The administration's argument was this: standardized barcodes and a federal tracking portal would give the mail-ballot system a uniform, verifiable layer of accountability it currently lacks. That argument has a legitimate policy foundation, whatever one thinks of how it was pursued.

The Implementation Concern — Also Taken Seriously

The loudest objections to this specific rule came from the people who would have had to run it — many of them Republicans.

More than three dozen current and former election officials signed a brief to the Supreme Court asking it to block the rule. Among them: Republican Secretaries of State from Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, New Hampshire, North Dakota, and South Dakota, along with Utah's Lieutenant Governor, also a Republican. Their argument was about readiness. They took no position on whether the Postal Service has the authority to issue the rule. They wrote that election offices "simply do not have the time, money or staff to comply."

It was unclear when the federal portal the rule required would be ready. The rule provided no federal money for the portal, for state system integration or for county compliance, according to the National Association of Counties. Counties would have absorbed the cost of new envelopes, system changes and staff training. The rule had no safe harbor for minor or correctable defects, and a noncompliant mailing was rejected whole and returned to the county. An anonymous USPS whistleblower, in a complaint released by Sen. Richard Blumenthal's office, described the internal process as "secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed."

North Carolina had already begun mailing absentee ballots ten days before the Supreme Court ruling. The election was underway.

Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson — a Republican whose state votes mostly by mail — told voters before the ruling that they "can be confident that they're going to get a ballot in the mail."

The concern was not that ballot security is unimportant. The concern was that an unfinished system imposed weeks before an election, with no federal funding behind it, would create the very chaos and distrust it claimed to prevent.

What the Court Actually Decided — and What It Didn't

The Supreme Court did not rule that mail-in voting is beyond regulation.

It did not say the administration's concerns about ballot integrity are wrong.

It said the government was unlikely to succeed in its challenge to the block on the rule, and that the balance of harms did not favor lifting it. It gave no further reasons. It did not decide who holds the pen.

Justice Kavanaugh wrote that the rule has a fair prospect of being within the Postal Service's authority — just not now. The legal fight continues. For 2028, this question is very much alive.

What's Still Unresolved — and Why It Matters

The court settled the procedural question for this election cycle. The deeper question remains.

How does the United States build a mail voting system that Americans across the political spectrum can actually trust?

If millions of Americans doubt the integrity of mail voting — whatever the documented fraud rate shows — that doubt is itself a problem worth solving. Confidence in elections is not a luxury. It is load-bearing.

If millions of other Americans depend on mail voting to participate at all — and a poorly designed reform creates chaos at the ballot box — that is also a problem worth solving.

The Constitution points to where the solution has to come from. Congress and the states hold the pen. The courts hold the guardrails. The executive branch holds it only where Congress has handed it over, and the courts are now deciding whether Congress did.

Whether that framework needs updating — and how — is a debate worth having. In the right room. Through the right process. With enough time to do it without breaking something in the middle of an election.

That debate hasn't happened yet. It probably should.

Update, October 16: What the Opinions Say

Facts current as of October 16, 2026.

When I wrote this piece on September 22, I told you the Supreme Court refused to lift the block and that Justices Alito and Thomas dissented. I did not tell you why. I have now read the opinions, and the why matters.

Alito did not stop at timing. He wrote that “the crux of the dispute is whether the Postal Service has statutory authority to issue the rule.” He wrote that “the Postal Service has broad authority to regulate the mail,” and that the states’ claim “is based on a contestable reading of a broadly drawn statute.” His view rests on a deferential standard of review. He wrote that he expressed “no view on whether the Government would be likely to succeed on de novo review.” Justice Kavanaugh, agreeing with the result, wrote that there is “at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service’s statutory authority.”

The judges who blocked the rule saw it the other way. Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee in Washington, ruled on September 13 that “no statute grants the Postal Service the power to issue key parts of the Rule.” He noted that the government concedes the Postal Service could issue the rule “only if Congress gave it the authority to do so.” In Boston, Judge Indira Talwani wrote that Congress “has never delegated its Elections Clause power to the USPS.” Based on the judges’ responses one can only determine that the judges are split on the statutory question, which is nothing unusual.

Two more facts belong here. The first is about fraud. In August, Judge Talwani wrote that “the record continues to lack any evidence regarding fraudulent absentee or mail-in voting.” Judge Nichols wrote that the federal government “does not point to any record evidence that there will be significant fraud in the upcoming elections.” Those are findings about the record in these cases. They do not say fraud never happens. Alabama’s attorney general has brought charges in two 2025 municipal elections, in Monroe and Lowndes counties. They are charges, not convictions. A judge dismissed a few counts in the Monroe County case in April. No convictions or pleas have been reported.

The second fact is about the calendar. Nothing new has happened at the Supreme Court since September 14.

None of this moves where I landed on September 22. It sharpens it. If the statute already covers this rule, then Congress gave the power, and it should say so out loud. If it does not, Congress can give it. Either way, fix it where the Constitution says to fix it, by statute, before the ballots are in the mail.

Corrections, October 16, 2026: This piece originally said a federal court ruled “earlier this year” that the Constitution gives election authority to Congress and the states. That ruling came in April 2025. It attributed the “most secure” statement about 2020 to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency itself; it came from the election security councils that work with the agency. It described the Supreme Court’s September 14 order as a decision on constitutional authority; the order gave no reasons beyond “unlikely to succeed” and the balance of harms. It gave the fraud rate per “votes cast”; the figure is per mail vote. It also quoted Utah’s lieutenant governor from a statement we could not source, and gave details about the House committee analysis, the election officials’ brief, and how the rule would have worked that did not match the sources. Each has been corrected.