President Donald Trump’s vision for a national database of eligible voters may be faltering.
The courts on Thursday undermined the weight of Postmaster General David Steiner’s threat that the postal service will refuse to deliver mail-in ballots from states that don’t submit voter lists to the government.
And that’s not the only hurdle: Even if Trump wins this legal battle, current and former government officials are skeptical that the Trump administration could logistically create eligible voter lists by November.
“There are key questions of, do they have the capability to do what the executive order tells them to do,” one senior postal official said.
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“I certainly don’t think the ability to do that existed before the publication of the executive order,” said Mike Plunkett, a long-time USPS executive who now leads the Association of Postal Commerce, a coalition of large-scale mail users like Amazon, CVS and UPS.
“That’s fairly rapid development of a complex technology platform,” he said. “They don’t have a good track record of doing things like that.”
In March, the president gave the Department of Homeland Security 90 days to cobble together data from various government agencies to create lists, by state, of citizens eligible to vote in the upcoming midterm elections.
DHS is supposed to send each state its list before each federal election takes place, and states are supposed to send their own lists of eligible voters to USPS. Trump tasked the Justice Department with enforcing the order, including by withholding funds for states and localities or prosecuting officials who do not comply.
Within a day of Steiner’s Wednesday warning to lawmakers, a federal judge sided with Democratic states that sued over the order, blocking the USPS from refusing to deliver mail-in ballots for now. The Trump administration is virtually certain to appeal the decision, and the White House said on Thursday it is confident it will be able to implement the order by November.
But the key federal agencies tasked with seeing it through lack the fundamental capacity and data required for implementation under the truncated deadline Trump established, agency officials said.
In a June 8 memo providing implementation details for Trump’s executive order, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edlow suggested the Trump administration would take as many shortcuts as possible to get initial data to states while key agencies would punt on more detailed questions. States will have access to USCIS, SSA and State Department data through an existing federal portal known as Login.gov.
From there, however, the questions get more complicated.
Agencies are still working to establish a means to compile and transmit data to states, Edlow said, noting that “back-end development is underway.” He said “initial testing is being planned” to ensure states can actually access the information, but even that process remains a ways off.
“No live data has been used to date, however,” Edlow said.
DHS will later work to actually sort through the data and create a consolidated list of U.S. citizens and residents in each state. It must provide such lists to state election officials by early September.
States appear to be in the dark on how the process will play out. John Milhofer, director of research and analysis at the National Association of Secretaries of State, told NOTUS that “to our knowledge, DHS has not provided states with any final plans or guidance on implementation.”
American elections are administered by states, as prescribed by the Constitution, and their secretaries of state generally oversee that effort. States already use multiple checks to maintain their voter lists, and there is no evidence of large numbers of noncitizens widely voting in federal elections.
The potential for chaos was the basis of Democratical-controlled states’ lawsuits against Trump’s order. The states argued the order could create opportunity for large-scale errors as officials try to sort through various federal databases. They also challenged whether states have “reliable sources of information” underlying their data.
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said Trump was elected in part to crack down on alleged election fraud and that this order was just one step toward doing so.
“The entire Trump administration will continue lawfully enacting the agenda President Trump was elected to enact – which includes the safety and security of American elections,” Jackson said in a statement. “The administration remains confident that the Executive Order will be implemented by the November election, which was always the intent when it was signed.”
The Postal Service declined to comment.
Putting together lists of verified citizens could be challenging, as evidenced by previous efforts to do so under the Trump administration.
Some citizens aren’t captured in SSA data at all, as people don’t have to report a change in their immigration status to the agency unless they’re getting benefits from it. SSA itself has said that its data isn’t a definitive record of U.S. citizens.
“Social Security numbers are not verification of citizenship,” said Tina Waddell, former general counsel at SSA who left the agency last year. “SSA does not appear to be as careful in guarding its data the way the agency has historically protected data.”
DHS’ other attempt to build a searchable, national citizenship system, which relied on much of the same data as it’s using now to build these lists, was also blocked by courts this week; the administration has also lost in court nine times over efforts to obtain state voter rolls nationwide.
Merging different datasets to get a better picture is a massive technical undertaking, Mark Forman, who was in charge of the federal government’s information technology and associated policies during the George W. Bush administration, told NOTUS.
That’s in part because data may be formatted differently in each dataset. One dataset may list a full middle name and another just an initial, Forman said, and typos are also inevitable.
“Mashing up databases from different agencies has a structural limit on how much they can get rid of errors,” he said, adding that any mistakes could affect millions of voters.
“To get those errors out takes a lot of money and a lot of time and governance,” he said. “If you don’t fix the data, you’re going to get bad decisions, and these unintended consequences.”
Under a rule the USPS proposed earlier this month and is in the process of finalizing, the Postal Service would ask states to use the federal data to “enroll” individuals with the agency to ensure they are eligible to vote through the mail. USPS would create a unique barcode for each eligible voter, though states can update their lists up until the last day ballots can go out.
While it pledged to provide technical assistance to states, USPS insisted it would have no role in determining who is or is not eligible to vote and would simply accept the lists that states provide.
Details on how the Postal Service would implement its provisions under Trump’s order remain sparse. The agency noted in its proposal that details on how it would create barcodes, prepare and accept files, launch a data portal and determine whether ballots should be accepted are all still to come.
“There’s certainly more questions than answers in the proposal, particularly surrounding how … they operationally identify mail that should not be delivered to the election board,” the senior postal official said.
The official noted USPS has a history of prohibiting certain types of mail entering the system, such as hazardous materials or alcohol, but it has never been responsible for ensuring certain individuals cannot use its services.
In his memo, Edlow conceded the Postal Service has a long way to go before it can operationalize the cross-referencing of voter lists with DHS or states.
“No determination has yet been rendered as to the feasibility, desirability, or legality of such an approach, which, as noted above, is dependent on the outcome and content of a final USPS rulemaking, if any,” Edlow said. “Further policy and legal input would also need to be obtained prior to proceeding.”
The administration told a federal court last week it has issued additional documentation to Congress required whenever a federal agency creates a new data system to spell out how, and with whom, the information will be shared. While that issuance marks the next step for USPS to comply with its new requirements, those involved remain skeptical about the ambitious timeline.
“There’s no way to get an effective mechanism in place” by November, said a second senior postal official.
“We don’t keep lists of people and where they live, we don’t do databases,” the official said. “There’s just not a mechanism for it.”
Edlow wrote in the USCIS memo that DHS does not believe it is feasible for it to immediately roll out a planned portal for citizens to view their records and submit corrections as it creates its state-by-state lists of voting-eligible citizens. Instead, Edlow said, DHS will provide that functionality “at a later date.”
The entire Democratic caucus on Wednesday sent a letter to Steiner, the postmaster general, demanding he not move forward with implementing Trump’s order, which they said risked “disenfranchising millions of Americans.” Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) at Wednesday’s hearing called the plan an “an alarming departure” from the Postal Service’s “longstanding tradition of neutrally delivering all types of mail.” Later in the hearing, Steiner himself appeared to confirm Peters’ observation.
“We don’t open mail, we don’t stop the delivery of mail,” the postmaster general said.
The mail agency, older than the nation itself, is now looking to do that for the first time.
Correction: This article was updated to correct the spelling of former government information technology official Mark Forman’s name.
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