Gutting Mail-In Ballots Is Just The Beginning

Sources

Arnsdorf, Isaac. “Trump, Seeking Executive Power over Elections, Is Urged to Declare Emergency.” The Washington Post, February 26, 2026. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/02/26/trump-elections-executive-order-activists/.

Barrow. “Trump Casts Florida Mail Ballot as He Pushes Congress to Severely Limit That Voting Option.” AP News, March 24, 2026. https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-vote-by-mail-bd52fd205f4484237d5b77d2e7319350.

Dilworth, Jackie. “The SAVE America Act Threatens Accessible Voting for People with Disabilities.” The Arc, March 20, 2026. https://thearc.org/blog/save-america-act-voting-rights-disabilities/.

Howe, Amy. “Court Appears Ready to Overturn State Law Allowing for Late-Arriving Mail-in Ballots.” SCOTUSblog, March 23, 2026. https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/03/court-appears-ready-to-overturn-state-law-allowing-for-late-arriving-mail-in-ballots/.

“Nearly 1 in 3 Americans Voted by Mail in 2024.” States United Democracy Center, September 4, 2025. https://statesunited.org/resources/americans-vote-by-mail-2024/.

Shepard, Steven, Joseph Copeland, Shanay Gracia, and Jocelyn Kiley. “Most Americans Back Expanded Early Voting, Voting by Mail, Voter ID.” U.S. Elections & Voters. Pew Research Center, August 22, 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/08/22/majority-of-americans-continue-to-back-expanded-early-voting-voting-by-mail-voter-id/.

Stern, Mark Joseph. “The Alito Wing of the Supreme Court Sure Sounds Sold on Trump’s Voter Fraud Lies.” Jurisprudence. Slate, March 23, 2026. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/03/alito-supreme-court-trump-voter-fraud-lies.html.

“Table 11: Receipt and Postmark Deadlines for Absentee/Mail Ballots.” Accessed March 24, 2026. https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/table-11-receipt-and-postmark-deadlines-for-absentee-mail-ballots.

“Voting By Mail And Absentee Voting.” MIT Election Data + Science Lab, n.d., accessed March 24, 2026. https://electionlab.mit.edu/research/voting-mail-and-absentee-voting. 

Wang, Hansi Lo. “The Postal Service May Be out of Cash in 2027 without Congress’ Help, Postmaster Says.” Politics. NPR, March 17, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/03/17/nx-s1-5750419/usps-running-out-of-money-postal-service-david-steiner.

Transcript

Hi it’s Tuesday, March 24th, 2026, you’re tuned into Why, America? I’m your lawyer friend, Leeja Miller. Today is special election day in Florida and guess who voted by mail even though he was literally there all weekend and could have done early, in-person voting? Donald “mail in voting is corrupt as hell” Trump. I know we’re supposed to be silently resigned to the hypocrisy at this point but like COME ON. Let’s be so fucking for real. As this country’s infrastructure crumbles around us and we enter a multi-hundred-billion-dollar forever war, Trump has said that the Save America act currently tied up in the Senate and his desire to ban mail-in voting is the number one top priority most important thing right now. Even though everyone knows the Save America Act is doomed to fail, I made a whole episode about this last week, Trump is singlehandedly keeping it alive by berating Republicans in the Senate to keep hammering at it to make it pass. It would require onerous proof of citizenship hurdles for anyone attempting to register to vote that basically amount to a poll tax as US citizens would have to pay to get a new copy of their birth certificate or a passport, and even that may not be sufficient if you’ve gotten married and changed your name or are trans and your documentation is different. It is addressing a fake problem, voting by non-citizens is already illegal, voter fraud is so unbelievably rare and is not worthy of the outsized attention it is getting, much like trans girls playing high school sports it’s one of those things that is a non-issue and impacts a teensy tiny percentage of the whole in a way that doesn’t make any fucking sense why Republicans are spending so much time and money to turn it into an Issue unless, of course, there’s some other end game they’re trying to get at here. Which of course there is. Today we’re discussing the case heard by the Supreme Court yesterday that is poised to limit voting by mail, and what Trump will do when the SAVE America Act fails to get through Congress–here’s a hint: there’s an executive order for that.

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Okay before we get into the details there’s one ground rule I really want to hammer home here, and that is Article 1, Section 4, Clause 1 of the US constitution dictates that, quote, “the times, places, and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations.” Okay so the Constitution states very clearly that it is the states who determine the time place and manner of voting in federal elections, which the Supreme Court has historically interpreted to give states quite broad powers. Other than states, Congress is the only other entity with authority to control elections. Notice how the president and the courts are very clearly absent and not given any role over determining the time place and manner of how our elections run. Okay so the president does not get to make an executive order to control how elections are run, and the courts do not get to dictate how elections are run. The court’s sole duty with regard to elections is determining what Congress means in its laws related to the matter and how to apply that Congressional intent to the issue at hand. So with that clearly in mind, let’s go to the Supreme Court where yesterday they heard oral arguments related to a case called Watson v. RNC.

Here’s the basic background: a bunch of groups, including the Republican National Committee, sued the state of Mississippi over its vote-by-mail law which allows for the counting of ballots for five days after the election day, so long as the ballot was received by election day. So you mark your ballot, you drop it in the mail a few days before election day, doesn’t get there until a couple days after, doesn’t matter your vote still counts. The RNC argues that when Congress made a law that dictated that election day is the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, that clearly meant that votes were to be cast on that day, allowing for late acceptance of mailed ballots opens the door to voter fraud, causes a slippery slope because god there’s no limit the states could be accepting ballots until the day the new Congress is sworn in for all we know!! When will the madness end!!! And if that feels like a flimsy legal argument that’s because it fucking is.

Mississippi for its part defended its law by pointing to over a century and a half of Congressional laws that made it really clear that Congress does not consider “Election Day” to be THE day on which all votes must be received and counted. AND there is a LONG history of election regulations changing with the times. You have the Civil War, when both Union and Confederate soldiers were allowed to cast absentee ballots from the battlefield to be counted back home. You have laws passed during World War II that allowed soldiers overseas to cast their votes via absentee ballots. And then you have more recent laws like the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act or UOCAVA and the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment or MOVE Act meant to encourage voters overseas to submit absentee ballots. At the same time as Congress is passing all these measures to expand and encourage voting by mail, states are passing absentee ballot laws for civilians, starting as early as the late 1800s to allow people to vote if they are traveling, away from home, or seriously ill. In the 1980s, California became the first state to allow no-excuse absentee ballots, meaning voters can just freely request an absentee ballot, they don’t need to give a reason as to why they need one. That spread so that now 28 states and the District of Columbia allow no-excuse absentee ballots.

Currently, 14 states plus Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and DC accept and count mailed ballots if they are received within a certain time frame after election day but postmarked on or before Election Day. Mississippi is one of them, and those are the states that will be impacted by this ruling. Those states include heavy hitters like California, Texas, Illinois, and New York.

So, you have all these states creating all these rules about allowing for the inclusion of ballots received after election day at the same time you have Congress making laws about expanding mail-in ballots, and at no time did Congress ever take issue with the fact that some of these mail-in ballots would be counted after election day, despite knowing that was the case. Additionally, Congress never took issue with early voting, which the RNC and the opponents of the Mississippi law said were squarely off the table, they were ONLY objecting to the late acceptance of the ballots. Which again indicates the weakness of their legal argument–if they’re arguing that Congress meant Election Day to be the one day when votes can be accepted and counted, then would they not have also taken issue with all the early voting that happens across the country? And, again, it is the Supreme Court’s job in this case to make a ruling as to the intent of Congress. Nevertheless, all morning yesterday the conservative justices presented random, fantastical hypotheticals and hypotheses and handwringing over whether late-accepted ballots might present the possibility of a loss of trust in the elections process because a party who is winning but then the results flip when the late ballots are counted would OBVIOUSLY then suspect fraud in the voting counts if that were to happen.

And this is where I want to pause because it was this line of questioning from the conservative justices that made shockingly apparent the fact that they are eating up the Republican talking points and attempting to apply them to their jobs on the court. First of all, again, it is not the court’s job to fret over the legitimacy of elections or to pass any rules about elections at all. It is the states and Congress who should be fretting over how to make elections legitimate. It is only the court’s job, again PER THE CONSTITUTION, to suss out Congress’ intent. Congress has never passed laws that took issue with late-mailed ballots, they have left that to the states. Who is the only person who has ever raised the issue of potential voter fraud happening in the late-mailed ballots? Trump. And the 2020 election deniers. Because the 2020 election saw unprecedented levels of mail in ballots, for obvious reasons, because there was a deadly contagious disease ripping through our communities so people chose to stay home and vote from a safe distance. Well, Democrats did at least, because somehow a major pandemic was made political and one party stayed home and out of harm's way while the other made claims that the whole thing was fake and that their liberty depended on being free to infect and be infected. And so as the results of the Presidential election came in in 2020, at first it appeared Trump could win, but after days of counting, including late ballots, it turned out Biden actually won. And ever since then, Trump has had his sights set on mail in ballots, even though he himself has relied on them numerous times throughout the years. Even though there is very little evidence that fraud ever happens in any of our elections including with mail in ballots and the couple instances of fraud that have been found would have absolutely zero impact on the outcome of any election. But it has been Trump, for SIX FUCKING YEARS NOW, who has spouted, non-stop, the lie that fraud occurred during the 2020 election, that our elections are riddled with fraud, that something has to be done to stop the fraud. The fraud that doesn’t fucking exist. The fraud that no one thought existed until Trump started screaming about it. The fraud that Trump was never able to prove existed despite numerous attempts in court to do so. And yet despite all this it is this same fraud that has now made its way into the hearts and minds of the justices in the highest court in our land who are now so concerned with this fake fraud that is entirely made up by Donald Trump that they appear to be ready to completely do away with late-counted ballots altogether even though their only job here is to interpret Congress’ intent and Congress never indicated any intent to do that. Like that’s how batshit bonkers this country is at this point we’ve lost the fucking plot at every fucking level in every fucking branch.

Okay so that decision will likely come down in July, some say June but this court has been taking their sweet fucking time so probably July, which means that it’s going to force all the states that accept late ballots to scramble to get their shit together and update their processes ahead of the November elections and undergo a herculean effort to try to educate the public about getting their ballots in early to ensure they get counted. That fucking sucks. In the 2024 election, there were roughly 750,000 votes that would be completely disqualified under this new ruling. That’s a lot, though in the grand scheme of things it’s not a HUGE percentage of the tens of millions of votes cast in our federal elections, whether in person or by mail.

So how impactful would this ruling really be? 750,000 votes is really important, and there are certain regions where this will HEAVILY impact voters, like rural regions of Alaska where voting by mail is the only option. There are also entire populations that will be impacted, like disabled voters HALF of whom vote by mail. 40% of voters aged 65 plus vote by mail as well. In fact, 1 in 3 Americans vote by mail. That’s 1 in 4 Democrats, and 1 in 5 Republicans. White people make up the largest racial group that votes by mail. 38% of urban residents vote by mail, compared to 33% of suburban voters and 24% of Rural voters who vote by mail. Over 900,000 people living or serving overseas vote by mail. Tons and tons and tons of people rely on mail in voting in the United States, accounting for over 48 million votes in 2024. With that in mind, the 750,000 ballots that arrived after election day and were still counted in 2024 is quite a small number compared to the whole.

Additionally, studies have been mixed about how effective vote-by-mail options are at increasing turnout and civic engagement, with the MIT Election Data and Science Lab concluding, quote “extending vote by mail options increases turnout modestly in midterm and presidential elections but may increase turnout more in primaries, local elections, and special elections.” I do think that’s important to note–the disenfranchisement that may happen in primaries and local elections is important as a lot of power can be gained at the local level that then trickles upwards. The MIT lab also concluded, quote “As with all forms of voter fraud, documented instances of fraud related to voting by mail are rare.” The lab also argues that allowing for early voting and voting by mail decreases the chances that campaigns will engage in tactics like an “October surprise” where they reveal something damning to try to influence the outcome of elections. People who vote by mail will have already voted by the time the surprise hits. Though studies show the earliest voters tend to be the most strongly partisan, so they would be less likely to be swayed by an October surprise anyway.

So while I don’t want to discount that there WILL be widespread disenfranchisement if the Supreme Court does what most analysts think they will and issue a ruling that bans states from accepting ballots after election day, 750,000 people attempting to vote and getting their voice silenced on a technicality is a grave miscarriage of justice, the importance of democracy should not hinge on how quickly a ballot is delivered, what I’m MORE concerned with is the cumulative effect that this ruling adds to, which is the outcome of efforts by Republicans to undermine our elections and ensure that as few people as possible are able to vote. Because Watson v. RNC is just one piece of the larger puzzle.

And other pieces of that puzzle have been on stark display this week, though you might have missed them. Please have zero doubt that Trump sending ICE agents into the airports this week is a trial run for sending them to our polling places. Airports are easier because they’re under federal jurisdiction, Trump is likely within his rights to send in ICE. It’s also been painfully clear how fucking useless ICE is, like if you ever need more proof as to why they need to be fully defunded like look no further than the pictures of ICE agents milling about our airports while lines continue to be five hours long because ICE can’t fucking help TSA they don’t know what they’re doing. But having their presence become a daily fact of life in America now will make it a hell of a lot easier to force the people to swallow their presence at our polling places and wherever else a dictator might want to send his own personal police force going forward. They’re testing the waters.

And then you have the announcement from the postmaster general of the US Postal Service last week stating that at this rate the USPS will run out of money by 2027. When pressed on a timeline, the postmaster general stated that actually it could run out of money by as soon as THIS OCTOBER unless it defaults on some of its debts. But even with defaulting on debts, it’ll be broke by February 2027. October 2026 is a really interesting date for the USPS to run out of money, don’t you think? Trump has long been calling for the privatization of the USPS and he placed David Steiner at the head of USPS for a reason–he’s also been sitting on the board of FedEx since 2009. So you have a president calling for the privatization of a public service that millions of Americans rely on every week and have for centuries, including in rural areas where private delivery services refuse to go, a service that is so essential it is something the government has been providing since the beginning of this country specifically BECAUSE it is not economically feasible for private companies to continue delivering to remote locations. The USPS has seen a financial shortfall nearly every single year since 2007 with the rise of digital communications. Amazon accounts for upwards of 15% of all USPS mail now, and has been threatening to sharply cut the number of packages it sends via USPS according to the Wall Street Journal. And you have a man at the helm of the agency that is on the board of a company that would financially benefit from the downfall of the USPS. And the USPS is the entity we rely on to accept and process our mail-in ballots. There are states that have other options–in some states you can drop your ballots into a box or at an official collection site. Those are, of course, also the target of believers of the big lie and others who are convinced our elections are beset by fraud despite the lack of evidence. But if the Supreme Court rules that all ballots must be received by election day and then the USPS runs out of money in October right before the election, even if they continue service it could mean significant delays which could result in further disenfranchisement.

And then you have the SAVE Act which is currently being debated in the Senate and is all but certain to fail. Like I said, I made an entire episode about it already, but it would again make registering to vote and, therefore, voting harder for a whole swath of people. For mail-in-voting it would require people to send in a photocopy of their ID in order to vote by mail. Who the fuck has a printer in this economy, yaknow? And none of these measures, by the way, are guaranteed to help Republicans. There are TONS of rural and 65+ voters who vote Republican by mail or married Republican women whose names don’t match their birth certificates anymore. The adage is that the fewer people who vote, the better Republicans do, but that’s not always true and there are studies that suggest it’s a mixed bag. One conclusion to draw from this is that Republicans are so terrified of fraud and so convinced of Trump’s lies and so scared of the illegals running free in this country that they’re willing to shoot themselves in the foot out of fear. That may be true for some of the Republicans in Congress. But I also think it’s important to remember the ethos animating a lot of the policy in Trump 2.0 and that was behind Project 2025 and that inspires many of Trump’s goons pulling the strings behind the scenes. JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, Steven Miller, Elon Musk, they’re all motivated by this kind of mashup of white Christian Nationalism and technocapitalism, where pluralist democracies are actually anathema to their beliefs and their end goals, where the ultimate “freedom” is the development of unfettered AI, the monopolization of every industry, and the continued stratification of wealth at the very top. Check out my episode about Curtis Yarvin for a deeper dive into this ideology. Because our tech overlords, led by the likes of Peter Thiel, who himself has said democracy gets in the way of freedom, believe that they are the smartest guys in the room, the best possible leaders to bring humanity into the glory of the AI age or whatever the fuck other bullshit they like to spew from their out of touch ivory towers while the world burns. Democracy gets in the way of their end goals. And luckily for them the coffin lid is already firmly on democracy in America, we are in the process of applying the last few nails. The will of the people hasn’t mattered for almost 2 decades at this point, if not longer, thanks to money influencing every aspect of our government and our elections, and getting rid of elections is the final step towards solidifying what has already been in the works. I don’t mean to sound conspiratorial, but it’s the only reasoning I can come up with to explain why Republicans are so deadset on making it as hard as possible for Americans to vote even when it means disenfranchising their own people in the process. It’s because they don’t believe in the premise itself of free and open and fair elections. Of a functioning, pluralistic democracy. It doesn’t serve them.

And the goons that believe this have been hard at work behind the scenes in preparation for the midterms. The Washington Post reported a month ago that there was a 17-page draft executive order making the rounds that would promote false claims about Chinese interference in the 2020 election as a basis for announcing a state of emergency due to national security concerns that would suspend mail-in voting except in limited circumstances, ban voting machines, require hand-marked and hand-counted paper ballots, require all voters to re-register in order to vote with proof of citizenship, and send ICE to polling places to ensure the safety and security of the election. This time, though, unlike the airports today, maybe they’ll be a little armed, as a treat.

This was reported a month ago at this point and there’s no way of knowing how that draft Executive Order will have changed since then, but my guess is that Trump is leaning hard on the SAVE Act because it does a lot of this work for him, and whether or not it passes, but especially if it doesn’t pass, which it won’t, he is going to issue this executive order at some point in the next few months and use it to try to exert as much control as he possibly can over the midterm elections. I made an episode gaming out the different midterm election scenarios and I said the same thing then, I think it’s not a matter of if but a matter of when he issues this emergency declaration.

Okay what do we do about this–well voting is only one of a small number of levers we have to make ourselves heard and to ensure the continuation of a pluralistic democracy in this country. So I don’t think voting is a revolutionary act I think it is truly the least you can do. But it is likely going to become harder than ever to do so. And while I wish there was a way to fight this that didn’t comply with increased demands, I do think there are proactive things we all can be doing to ensure our vote is counted and the election is as protected as it can be. Make sure you have your birth certificate on hand or get a passport if you can. Easier said than done for many people, but if that’s available to you please get on it. If you plan on voting by mail, make sure you know your state’s process for that and you are requesting that ballot as early as possible. I think 45 days before the election is pretty standard. I know in Minnesota you can get the ballot emailed to you. You have to print it out and mail it in but at the very least that removes one leg of the journey of obtaining the ballot. Get that sucker in as early as you can. If you are mailing it from inside the US, when you drop it at USPS, you can request a postmark on your ballot when you drop it off. That will matter less if the Supreme Court rules that late ballots don’t count anyway, but at least you can point to a date when you dropped it off, in the event that it takes a long time to get to where it needs to go because of USPS delays. I would say try to get that thing mailed two weeks before election day to be on the safe side. Make sure you are registered to vote! Double check it in the months leading up to the elections because I’ve heard reports that people are getting erroneously kicked off voter rolls in some states, so keep on top of that. And if you have the bandwidth, consider volunteering to be an election worker, google your secretary of state, I guarantee you they are already considering various scenarios involving federal interference, and having more people there to ensure the smooth functioning of the election will only be a net positive. There are also local orgs all over the country working to ensure people are registered to vote that you can get involved with to increase public knowledge about how and when to vote and get as many people registered as possible.

But of course, this is a LOT. The vast majority of you watching this aint gonna do all that. I know that and I get that and that’s kinda the point. You shouldn’t have to do all that in order to vote. Voting is the least you can do in a pluralist democracy. And even that they are trying to make as hard as possible, because they know most people think about politics for like five minutes a week, and most people don’t pay attention to an election until a week or two before at best, and so they’re betting most people aren’t going to even know these things are happening, let alone know how to counteract them and then actually follow through on what they need to do to actually get their vote in. This is a problem for the people who believe in free and fair elections, in a pluralistic democracy where everyone’s voice should be heard and should matter equally, but this is the precise desired outcome for the people who benefit from our disenfranchisement, who benefit from us staying quiet and uninformed. So at the very least we can’t let them win on that last front. Share this with a friend to get the word out and if you watch all my videos but somehow aren’t subscribed yet, please tap that subscribe button, it really helps this channel out!

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And if you liked this episode, you’ll like my episode from last week about what a big fucking creep Jared Kushner is.