The post New Mail Voting Rules Moved Forward Despite USPS Officials’ Concerns About Mass Disenfranchisement appeared first on ProPublica .
Page A4From§Eachthe coffee break edition — 2 September 2026
The push to 'protect elections' targets a judge, not the mail rules USPS warns could disenfranchise voters.
As it ran on the front
I found the page again last night, dog-eared, coffee ring on the corner. I'd underlined one phrase twice: to protect elections. I wrote that down the same week I wrote down something else, in the same folder — hold on, let me find it — here it is. Two entries, same week. One says a judge ought to be impeached to protect elections. The other says the U.S. Postal Service put its own concerns in writing about new mail voting rules, concerns about what they themselves called mass disenfranchisement. I keep going back to that one word. Protect.
Now, I don't know what protect means at every house, but I know what it means at mine. When my wife tells me to protect the tomatoes from the rabbits, she doesn't mean put a sign on the neighbor's fence and leave our own gate open. She means go look at the actual hole and fix it. So I went out to test the word on something I understand. Chain-link fence, one section's been sagging since the Carter administration, patched twice already with wire I keep in a coffee can out in the garage. If I wanted to protect that garden, the fix is right there — coffee can, pliers, twenty minutes. I don't drive down to the corner store and impeach the mailman.…
…(cont) But that's my yard. Theirs is bigger, and their sagging section, best I can tell from the page, is the actual mechanism — new mail voting rules, moved forward, with the people who count the letters for a living on record about what could go wrong. That's not my word, disenfranchisement. That's theirs, in the filing, in ink. And instead of anybody going out to look at that hole, what gets the impeachment push is a judge. One judge, a whole column of column-inches, to protect elections, they said. I've sat at plenty of toll plazas and never once seen them fix a pothole by firing the guy in the booth.
So here's what's in the folder, side by side, same week. A fence with an actual documented hole in it — the mail rules, USPS's own people flagging the risk, nobody out there with a coffee can. And a hundred yards over, at a fence nobody's shown me a hole in, a full impeachment push, dressed up as protection. I'm no engineer. I just look at where the repair crew showed up and where it didn't. The dog doesn't care either way, he just wants the gate fixed so he can get to the yard, and even he's noticed nobody's out there.
I've got the page right here if anybody wants to see it, dates and all — I don't lose these. Which leaves me with the one thing I can't get past: the mail rules USPS flagged in writing moved forward anyway. Who exactly signed off on moving forward past a warning that specific, sitting in their own file, addressed to nobody but ignored by everybody who could've read it?
“They call it protecting elections and what gets protected is a judge's paycheck, not a single ballot. The people who actually count the mail put their concerns in writing and got moved past. Watch whose ballot doesn't make it and you'll know who this was really for.”
“Look, impeachment for defying a Supreme Court ruling is a serious constitutional matter, it has nothing to do with elections at all — well, the piece is literally titled 'to protect elections,' I didn't write the headline. The mail rules are a totally separate administrative matter, USPS just raised some concerns, that's not disenfranchisement — okay, that was their word, not mine, I'm just reading it off the page here.”
The receipts
Judge Indira Talwani issued a temporary restraining order against Trump's election security rule a day after the Supreme Court reversed her injunction.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.