Trump Executive Order 14399 Directs USPS to Restrict Mail Ballots and Build a De Facto Federal Voter Registry (2026-03-31)

Trump signed Executive Order 14399, "Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections," directing the U.S. Postal Service to issue regulations restricting mail-in voting for federal elections: states would be required to submit lists of every voter eligible to vote by mail — names, addresses and unique ballot-envelope barcodes — to a new federal portal, and USPS would refuse to deliver any ballot that did not comply or whose recipient was absent from the list. States that declined to hand over their voter rolls would have had all mail ballots refused, effectively ending vote-by-mail in the eight states that conduct elections entirely by mail and the 29 more that offer no-excuse absentee voting. The order claimed that "unique ballot envelope identifiers, such as bar codes, enable confirmation that only citizens receive and cast ballots" — though the administration would later provide courts with no evidence of mail-voting fraud, which studies and audits consistently show is vanishingly rare. The EO also directed USCIS and the Social Security Administration to build state citizenship lists. Election administration is constitutionally vested in the states and Congress under the Elections Clause; 37 senators wrote USPS in April demanding it refuse the order, noting the Postal Service is an independent establishment whose operations the President does not direct. This order is the origin of every subsequent USPS mail-ballot rule, lawsuit and injunction through the September 14, 2026 Supreme Court ruling that finally blocked it.