Earlier this month, the Supreme Court blocked an executive order from President Donald Trump restricting voting by mail in ways that could have thrown the upcoming midterms into chaos. But the White House originally had far more disruptive plans, ProPublica has learned. 

According to several people knowledgeable about the discussions, the administration initially floated an idea that would have virtually shut down mail voting: requiring all ballots to be delivered exclusively through certified mail. The proposal — which would have required voters to be home and sign for delivery of their ballots — was ultimately abandoned, after vehement Postal Service objections that it would have been impossible to execute. 

Even after the idea fizzled, Postal Service officials were cut out of crucial conversations as the Trump administration moved forward with what became the final executive order, two people familiar with the matter said. Issued in March, its contents came as a shock even to the Postal Service’s lawyers.

Trump’s order would have forced postal workers to serve as gatekeepers, deciding which ballots would be delivered and which wouldn’t. Beyond that, it would have inexplicably handed authority over the plan’s execution to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who has no formal oversight over the Postal Service. 

Inside the Postal Service, which is overseen by a bipartisan Board of Governors, deliberations on whether to comply with the order stretched on for weeks. Some board members found it alarming but feared Trump would respond to a direct challenge by trying to fire them, sources familiar with their concerns told ProPublica. Instead, they remained silent, counting on the courts to block the measure. 

“The board was being careful how or when it took action, knowing that it might be its last action,” one source said. 

ProPublica previously detailed postal officials’ deep concerns with the Trump order. Now our reporting reveals how the order came to be and who was involved in crafting it, as well as the extent to which the White House tried to dictate how mail-in ballots would be processed.

The White House team leading the mail-in voting discussions included J. Brian Sikma, a special presidential assistant who has been involved in other administration election initiatives,

including identifying noncitizen voters for prosecution and seeking to ban voting machines. (Sikma didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

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The commerce secretary, Lutnick, served in “an advisory and coordination capacity” in drafting the order, a department spokesperson confirmed to ProPublica.

“President Trump values Secretary Lutnick’s advice on many matters,” the spokesperson said.

In an emailed statement, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis denied the administration had interfered improperly with the Postal Service, an independent agency whose governance structure is specifically designed to protect it from political influence. She said the executive order “added important safeguards to vote-by-mail. These were commonsense measures to protect the security of mail-in ballots and to ensure only Americans vote in American elections.” 

Bis also rejected the idea that the certified-mail proposal was “unworkable,” saying this played no part in the administration’s decision “to go in another direction.”

A Postal Service spokesperson declined to comment on the agency’s internal deliberations about the executive order and said it was the Board of Governors’ policy not to discuss them.

He referred ProPublica to an earlier statement by Postmaster General David Steiner that said: “Postal employees take great pride in their responsibility to support the democratic process. We will continue to approach that responsibility with the care, professionalism, and dedication that voters and election officials expect from the United States Postal Service.”

In an interview, Jonathan Smith, president of the American Postal Workers Union, called the Trump administration’s push to revamp mail voting problematic and baseless. 

“The ultimate goal was to create chaos and doubt in the vote-by-mail process,” he said. “You’re creating a rule to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.” 

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The White House first reached out to the Postal Service in the fall of 2025, saying the administration wanted to explore how to improve mail voting. 

Trump has long claimed without evidence that mail voting is riddled with fraud, though he frequently votes by mail himself. He’s said the process is “inherently corrupt” and contributed to his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.

Postal Service leaders responded to the administration’s late 2025 overture with recommendations they had been making to local election officials for years. Nearly a third of all ballots in the 2022 and 2024 elections were cast through the mail. Mostly, independent audits showed, the system worked reliably. But at times, ballots got lost or delayed. 

Officials with the Postal Service had long wanted election offices to use standardized ballot envelopes with scannable barcodes, logos and other features that would make it easier to separate election mail from other first-class mail. In 2024, a bipartisan bill to turn those recommendations into requirements stalled in the Senate.

When Trump retook the Oval Office, it soon became obvious the White House had other ideas, including requiring ballots to be sent by certified mail.

Doing this could, in theory, erase some security concerns, but local governments would have to pay a higher fee to send each envelope and postal workers would have to conduct millions of identity checks, crippling timely delivery. 

“It was just, for many reasons, a terrible idea,” one top Postal Service official said.

The White House backed down, but when the final order was unveiled, postal officials said they were surprised to see it demanded that they implement the envelope changes and ballot-tracking measures they’d recommended in time for the midterms.

The directive also required states to provide the Postal Service with lists of eligible mail voters, which workers would then try to match with ballots before sending them out. Designing a new ballot-tracking system would normally take about a year, postal officials said.

They were particularly concerned with the order’s requirement that Postal Service workers reject ballots for an array of reasons, ranging from outdated voter information to unscannable bar codes. All mail ballots from a state could be rejected if the state refused to provide its voter list. 

“That’s not what we do,” a former official involved with the discussions said. “We deliver mail. We don’t decide what goes and what doesn’t.”

Postal Service officials were taken aback that the final order put Lutnick in charge of coordinating with other agencies and the postmaster general in “effectuating all relevant aspects of the implementation.”

Lutnick’s involvement came after Trump had discussed putting the Postal Service under the Commerce Department. At Lutnick’s February 2025 swearing-in, Trump said he thought Lutnick’s “great business instinct” was just what the Postal Service needed. (The postal board fought back, and Trump’s idea of merging the agency into the Commerce Department is apparently no longer on the table.)

Almost immediately after the executive order became public, four separate lawsuits challenging it were filed by states led by Democrats and political and civil rights groups. Democratic members of Congress and postal union leaders urged the Postal Service and its Board of Governors, which had long defended the agency’s independence, to resist. A June 2026 Supreme Court decision allowing Trump to remove leaders of many agencies long considered independent gave the governors pause, however.

Steiner, appointed at Trump’s behest in mid-2025, directed Postal Service leaders to prepare to implement the order. In public statements, he defended the measure and said he would leave it for the courts to decide. At his direction, postal officials began establishing procedures to comply with Trump’s order. 

As they started to craft rules, career postal officials, concerned about voter privacy and disenfranchising legitimate voters, attempted to do as little as they could to comply, three people knowledgeable about their deliberations said. They looked for ways to protect workers from having to step out of their traditional lanes.

For example, they proposed having states turn over their voter lists but not requiring Postal Service workers to use them to decide which ballots to send out. When the Postal Service’s lawyer took the idea to the White House counsel, however, it was rebuffed as “not enough,” the former official said.

The White House team made clear that if even one ballot envelope in a batch mailing didn’t match the state list, the entire mailing should be rejected and election officials should be notified. “That means if four addresses don’t align in a mailing of one million, 999,996 other people don’t get their ballot tomorrow,” the former official said.

As ProPublica has reported, staffers found these issues highly troubling. A whistleblower complaint released in August warned that the system designed to carry out the executive order was rushed into being, untested and error-prone. 

The final rule — 95 pages spelling out how the agency would carry out Trump’s order — was issued on Aug. 21, less than a month before the first mail ballots were due to go out.

It left many questions unanswered: How would lists of voters be kept updated? How would the Postal Service ensure local officials were able to upload voter information to the agency’s new portal? How could postal officials approve the new ballot envelope designs required by nearly 10,000 voting jurisdictions in just weeks? 

“This was going to be a disaster,” the former postal official said.

The Sept. 14 Supreme Court ruling provided a reprieve, but Smith, the postal union president, criticized agency leadership for not stepping in more forcefully. Counting on the courts to halt the order, said Smith, was “a dangerous calculation, and showed a clear lack of courage and integrity.”

The post The untold origins of Trump’s plan to sharply restrict mail-in voting appeared first on Salon.com.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

For years, Khalwinder Singh Bhengura lived an unassuming life in Arlington, Texas, where the 69-year-old Indian immigrant works a graveyard shift preparing passenger meals for an airline catering company.

Bhengura moved to the U.S. and spent 18 years working toward becoming a legal resident, securing his green card in 2022. It was a cause for celebration in the Bhengura family. Then things took an unexpected turn.

In 2024, according to a federal indictment, Bhengura registered to vote and cast a ballot in the November presidential election, even though he’s not allowed to do so without being an American citizen.

Bhengura’s case is part of a Trump administration campaign to prioritize prosecuting noncitizen voters.

On Sept. 10, federal authorities arrested Bhengura and charged him with voting as an alien in a federal election and making a false statement about being a U.S. citizen in order to register to vote. That makes him one of 70 people the Trump administration has charged in voting fraud cases this year, according to Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter.

The list includes noncitizens from all corners of the globe, residing in all corners of the U.S. It features everyone from a 20-year-old college student from the Philippines accused of voting in Hawaii to a 39-year-old New Jersey restaurant owner from France. And an examination of the defendants and the filings in their cases found no sign of any organized efforts to cheat the American electoral system.

Votebeat reviewed Justice Department press releases and news accounts since June 1st and identified 41 recent cases involving noncitizens accused of voting. At least 23 defendants are legal residents holding green cards. Those charged range in age from 19 to 73 and come from at least 18 different countries, including Russia, Mexico, Australia, Israel, and Nigeria. Eight of the cases involved undocumented immigrants. About half of the cases come from Texas and New Jersey, with others popping up in a dozen other states, from Alaska to Louisiana.

Lawyers for most of the defendants did not respond to requests for comment. The list contains an eclectic assortment of alleged voter fraud cases. For example, one suspect in Massachusetts is accused of falsely impersonating his landlord to vote as part of a long-running feud between the two Chinese nationals.

The Justice Department has also charged American citizens in connection with the crackdown on fraudulent voting. One Pennsylvania man is accused of voting in both Alaska and Pennsylvania in the November 2024 presidential election. A city manager in Oklahoma is accused of signing voter registration forms for 11 residents.

But most of the cases involve immigrants like Bhengura who were on the pathway to U.S. citizenship when they voted in elections over the past decade. Bhengura’s lawyer says he acknowledged voting, but many of the cases involve nonresidents who secured their green cards, voted in elections, and then denied doing so when they were filling out paperwork or doing interviews to get their American citizenship, according to the legal filings.

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Joshua Ferrer, an assistant professor of government at American University, said many legal residents charged with improperly voting don’t realize they weren’t supposed to do so.

“It’s likely most of this is the result of confusion on the part of voters or election officials,” Ferrer said.

The fact that there are no indications that these voters were connected as part of any larger scheme “is another sign that the president’s claims of widespread voter fraud aren’t true,” he added.

Bhengura’s case raises a number of unanswered questions. Federal prosecutors said Bhengura registered to vote in 2024 when he applied for a driver’s license. But Texas law requires proof of citizenship or lawful presence to get a license, so it’s unclear how he could have been registered to vote if he had provided the documentation.

Knox, Bhengura’s attorney, defended him as “an honest, hard-working taxpayer and proud U.S. resident. He is terrified to face the government of the same nation that promised liberty and freedom. He prays that justice will prevail.”

Carol Lam, who served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California under President George W. Bush, questioned the Justice Department’s choice to prosecute these people. In her opinion, the government shouldn’t try to deport green card holders who didn’t know they couldn’t vote until they became American citizens.

“Our justice system was not created to terrorize people,” she said. “I think voting in national elections when you are not a citizen is a bad thing, but how you deal with these things is the question. If there is good evidence that the person didn’t intend to vote, that would be a slap-on-the-wrist kind of situation, and it’s instead being used to leverage people to be deported.”

Lam acknowledged that every administration has the leeway to decide what crimes to prioritize. But she questioned the Trump administration’s decision to devote so much time and energy to cases like Bhengura’s.

“Taking a 69-year-old grandfather with a green card with no apparent intent to violate the law who may have voted based on bad information and using it as a jumping-off point to deport a person would be at the bottom of my pile,” she said. “We had suspects who actually committed acts of violence, so there were so many more cases where life and limb were actually at stake.”

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

The post Alleged noncitizen voters targeted by feds from 18 different countries, mostly green card holders appeared first on Salon.com.

This article was first published by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive their biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This week, the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s plans to impose new rules for mail-in voting for the midterm elections in November. 

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

For months, President Donald Trump has been coping with his myriad failures and plummeting approval ratings by trying to make it harder for people to vote his party out of power in the 2026 midterms. To that end, in March, he issued an executive order that would require the U.S. Postal Service to draft a rule that would upend vote-by-mail procedures in dozens of states, and effectively block the agency from processing ballots that do not comply with the rule’s exacting requirements. Trump did not attempt to hide his motives for doing so: Legal restrictions on mail-in voting, he told Republican lawmakers, would “guarantee the midterms” for a party that is otherwise in danger of losing them badly.