A leading civil rights group asked a federal court on Wednesday to block the U.S. Postal Service’s proposed restrictions on mail-in voting, arguing they violate a settlement that required expedited mail-in ballot handling.
The Postal Service last week proposed a rule requiring states to provide lists of voters and adopt new balloting procedures before the mail agency would make deliveries. If states did not comply, the Postal Service would refuse to deliver the ballots.
The regulations stem from U.S. President Donald Trump’s March executive order that aimed to severely restrict mail-in voting, which he has said, without providing evidence, is prone to fraud.
In its motion before the District Court for the District of Columbia, rights group the NAACP said the USPS rule would create a process “that directly violates its obligations” under a 2021 legal settlement which forced USPS officials to prioritize ballot mail and take “extraordinary measures” to ensure its timely delivery.
The group asked a U.S. judge to issue a ruling by June 22, saying the postal plan could “prevent millions of eligible voters from receiving mail-in ballots to which they are entitled.”
“USPS has committed over and over to playing its part in democracy by prioritizing the timely delivery of mail-in ballots,” Samuel Spital, associate director-counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told Reuters. “And now for USPS to say we affirmatively will not deliver a ballot at all because it doesn’t meet criteria that we invented out of whole cloth, not only violates the settlement agreement, but also the historical role of the USPS in our democracy.”
A representative for the Postal Service declined to comment.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement on Monday, before the motion was filed, that the “Trump administration will continue lawfully enacting the agenda President Trump was elected to enact – which includes the safety and security of American elections … 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 NAACP’s 2020 lawsuit originally challenged new postal policies that slowed mail delivery at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and in the run-up to that fall’s presidential election.
Judge Emmet G. Sullivan held daily, and sometimes explosive, status conferences on the state of mail delivery, installing the court as a type of independent monitor of election mail. USPS implemented measures, including ballot-expediting procedures and daily facility ballot sweeps, to comply with Sullivan’s orders, and later made them standard operating procedure during election season.
In 2021, USPS and NAACP settled the case by agreeing to meet in the months before subsequent federal elections and maintaining the “extraordinary measures” for ballot delivery.
Wednesday’s motion says the settlement is “incompatible with a rule under which USPS chooses which mailed ballots to deliver – and which not to deliver.”
