New Rules for 2026: How Mail-In Voting is Getting Riskier

A Scenario for Less Voting This Election:

Imagine this: you hand your sealed returned mail-in ballot to your friendly neighborhood mailperson the Friday before election day. You’re sure you’ll receive a postmark today, and your state counted postmarks up to the day of the election in past elections, so you’ve got plenty of time. The problem? It’s 2026, and unlike in previous years the USPS won’t be postmarking your ballot until it reaches one of their regional processing centers, the timing of which is uncertain. Furthermore, a new Supreme Court ruling requires your county’s election office to stop counting ballots after election day, regardless of when they were received. Days later, you check your ballot status and learn it was received too late to be counted. Frustrated and unable to vote in person, you decide not to vote in the next election. 

This is the scenario that many voters may face during the 2026 election cycle. It’s a big change. Nearly 1 in 3 Americans voted by mail in the 2024 general election. Campaigns will need to quickly adapt their strategies and messaging to ensure votes will not be lost due to these changes during the upcoming election cycle. 

The New USPS Policy at Fault:

The changes to the Post Office’s postmarks and possession policy can be found on the Federal Register’s website: (FederalRegister.gov). Postal processing times are explicitly increasing for rural communities. Under the USPS’s new rules, “rural regions more than 50 miles away from regional processing centers now have one pickup a day, as opposed to two” (NOTUS). In practice, this means voters can no longer rely on the date they hand their ballot to the USPS as proof of when it was mailed. 

The below map from Brookings provides a high level look at where reductions in processing service are occurring due to the Regional Transportation Optimization (RTO) changes. Some states like Vermont and New Hampshire now have 100% and 89% of their zip codes served by the new “RTO post offices” which means a delay in mail processing of at least a day. This map also visualizes the uneven distribution of service slow downs between rural America and more-densley-populated America. Densely populated states such as Massachusetts, New Jersey, California, and Florida will be significantly less affected by this change, with the majority of those states' zip codes not seeing delays due to the reorganization.

So while a small town’s post office may look just as open as always, the speed at which that post office processes mail dropped off to it and a customer’s ability to count on postmarks as proof of when something was mailed has been lost. These changes are less visible than a post office closing but more impactful to people that rely on the service, leading to a dangerous gap in awareness and knowledge of these changes’ impacts.

Beyond the decrease in service reliability by the USPS, this year the US Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling on Mississippi’s COVID era law that allows votes to be counted up to five days after election day as long as they are postmarked on or before election day.

What This Means for Campaigns:

This uncertainty continues to push traditional Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) strategies earlier and earlier. This policy change and possible Supreme Court ruling signal a structural shift: if you’re mailing your ballot, mail it early and earlier than before. Voters need to be educated about this shift in thinking. While during COVID ad-hoc policies were put in place out of necessity to try to make sure as many votes were counted in spite of large changes to the election apparatus to respond to COVID, those policies are losing their cushion and demanding proactiveness from voters and campaigns. 

These changes will impact voters of both parties and potential voters of all candidates. StatesUnited.org compiled an excellent trove of statistics regarding mail in voting in 2024. In the 2024 general election, both President Trump and Vice President Harris won multiple states where the majority of ballots were cast by mail. More than 1 in 3 Republicans voted by mail in five states and Washington, D.C. (CO, CA, WY, ME, NV, and DC). More than 1 in 3 Democrats voted by mail in seven states and Washington D.C. (CO, CA, WY, ME, NV, IA, and DC).

Epilogue: What’s Going on With the USPS?:

The challenges to the USPS and potential solutions are beyond the scope of this article, but a US Inspector General report from 2025 contains some fascinating insights worth checking out. To help maintain service levels in rural areas, which the USPS has a government mandate to do, the USPS could request a $460 million annual subsidy, but it has not requested this since 1982, leaving $33 billion (adjusted for inflation) on the table. While the prevailing wisdom is that the USPS has become slower and less reliable over the past few decades, it’s not because of a lack of traditional post offices. While there have been closures, the USPS still maintains 92% of its traditional post offices as of 2024 as it did in 2000, despite a large reduction in demand for traditional mail service. Yet while the network of post offices has remained mostly intact over the last 25 years, demand for letter services has decreased by about half while e-commerce related demand for package shipping has increased, creating a surplus of capacity for letter processing but a shortage for package processing.

Want to talk about how your campaign or federal PAC can be ready for the possible changes in 2026? Let’s talk.

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