The United States Postal Service has one job: deliver the mail. For more than two centuries, it has done exactly that — reliably, efficiently, and without taking sides. Now, a presidential executive order threatens to change all of that, by requiring postal workers to verify voter eligibility before sending out absentee ballots. This is not the postal service's job. And it should not become it.

The American Postal Workers Union — representing 200,000 postal employees — has been clear: "It is not the job of the postal workers to verify voter eligibility. It is our job to move mail from one destination to the next." The National Rural Letter Carriers' Association agrees, warning that pushing the USPS into an election enforcement role "risks politicizing one of the nation's most trusted public institutions."

Determining who is and is not eligible to vote is a legal and governmental function — one that belongs to election officials, not mail carriers. Asking postal workers to make those calls doesn't make elections more secure. It puts an institution millions of Americans depend on every day squarely in the middle of a partisan fight — and undermines confidence in both the mail and our elections.

Mail voting has existed in this country since the Civil War, when Union Army soldiers cast the first mail ballots in 1864. It has served rural voters, shift workers, seniors, people with disabilities, and deployed service members for generations. A Brookings Institution report published in 2025 found that mail voting fraud occurs in only about four cases out of every 10 million ballots cast. The system works. What doesn't work is using a beloved public institution as a political tool.

We're calling on Congress to reject any effort — executive order or otherwise — that pushes the U.S. Postal Service into voter eligibility enforcement. Keep postal workers doing what they do best. Keep the USPS out of partisan politics. And protect every American's right to vote by mail.