Donald Trump has issued a Trump mail-in voting executive order that claims powers over federal elections he does not have, and it lands as ballots are already being sent out. The move arrives with less than two months before Election Day and with the rules around voting by mail already under pressure.
Marc said the stakes are too high to treat this as a passing fight. “Donald Trump’s plan is to make it harder for you to vote and easier for him to cheat,” he wrote, adding, “Now we know what that will look like in 2026.” That is why the order matters now: it is not a theory about the next election cycle, but a live attempt to reshape the one voters are already entering.
The order is only one part of a wider push. The U.S. Postal Service is trying to ram through a rule that would make voting by mail more difficult while requiring states to turn over sensitive voter data. It says the changes would let federal law enforcement conduct criminal investigations of alleged voter fraud, but the practical effect is clearer than the explanation: more friction for mailed ballots and more pressure on states to hand over information about voters.
That pressure does not stop there. The Department of Justice continues to sue for access to states’ complete voter files, while the head of the Civil Rights Division is threatening to deploy 1,000 federal agents to “monitor” polling places in the midterm elections. The Department of Homeland Security is also readying so-called state citizenship lists to send to states, even as the same apparatus is being used to launch what Marc calls a “massive witch hunt” over nonexistent, widespread voter fraud.
Nearly all of those moves are undisputed in the sense that they are happening. The dispute is over what they add up to. Marc argues the goal is authoritarian and designed to rig the vote, and the record of the past few weeks gives that view force: smaller changes at the U.S. Postal Service have already slowed mail service and delayed postmarks on envelopes, making returned ballots harder to count on time. The Postal Service changes are not limited to returned ballots, either; they reach into the mechanics of election mail itself.
Under Trump’s direction, the Department of Justice will now target state election officials under the guise that they have permitted illegal voting. The Republican National Committee has also joined the Trump administration in asking the Supreme Court to gut a federal law that limits last-minute voter purges. Add in election offices being overrun and infiltrated by election deniers trying to sow doubt from the inside, and the picture is of a coordinated effort rather than isolated moves.
The unresolved question is not whether the campaign is under way. It is whether the rules can be changed fast enough to matter before more ballots leave the mail stream. With 2026 still ahead and ballots already moving, the next test is whether the Postal Service rule and the broader federal push can be stopped before they harden into the new normal.
