Postmaster General Steiner Tells Congress USPS Will Withhold Mail Ballots From States That Refuse to Hand Over Voter Rolls

On June 24, 2026, Postmaster General David Steiner told a Senate committee that, under the proposed rule tied to Trump’s election executive orders (EO 14399), the USPS will withhold mail-ballot delivery from any state that does not provide the federal government with its absentee-ballot request lists. Five states — California, Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, and Washington — recently passed laws explicitly barring election officials from sharing voter rolls or machine access without a court order, and now face a direct threat that federal mail infrastructure will be turned against their absentee voters before the November 2026 midterms. The proposed rule’s comment period closes July 2; a federal judge in Massachusetts (Talwani) has allowed legal challenges to proceed.

This is an escalation from the May-29 proposed rule into an explicit on-the-record coercion: federal mail delivery conditioned on state surrender of voter data. It pairs with the SAVE voter-purge track (vacated on the merits 2026-06-22) as the two arms of the same EO-14399 electorate-control architecture — one purges the rolls, the other gates ballot delivery on the rolls. The load-bearing legal question is which EO provision authorizes USPS to condition delivery on voter-roll sharing.

Related events: 2026-05-29–usps-proposed-rule-mail-ballot-voter-list-federal-register-docket-2026-10968, 2026-05-28–nichols-declines-block-trump-mail-ballot-eo-dscc-naacp-lulac-consolidated, 2026-06-17–talwani-allows-mail-ballot-eo-challenge-rejects-ripeness-delay, 2026-03-31–trump-executive-order-restricts-mail-voting-usps-voter-lists, 2026-06-22–sooknanan-blocks-save-voter-purge-database-unlawful, 2026-04-03–23-states-sue-trump-mail-voting-executive-order.