Thursday, September 10, 2026
D.O.J. Escalates Threats to States in Battle for Election Records - The New York Times
D.O.J. Escalates Threats to States in Battle for Election Records
"The department sent letters to at least 30 states demanding they retain election records, an outgrowth of President Trump’s baseless claims of widespread election fraud.
The Department of Justice sent threatening letters to at least 30 top election officials across the country, expanding its efforts to gain access to private voter data and election records.
The letters warned states not to destroy any records related to the 2024 election, explaining that their chief election officials “are currently under investigation” and subject to “ongoing litigation.” The notices come amid a barrage of efforts by President Trump and his administration, which have been fruitless so far, to find evidence of widespread voter fraud.
It is not clear what the department is investigating, nor whether its probe is criminal or civil in nature. The letters do not cite any criminal statutes. Instead, they point to some of the same claims made previously as part of the administration’s ongoing effort to identify fraud in the nation’s elections, including machine anomalies and noncitizen voting. In court, the Justice Department has tried to force states to hand over unredacted voter lists, including personal information like driver's license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.
The Justice Department has sued 30 different states for this data. They’ve lost 23 of those cases and have won none. Decisions are pending in the rest.
Mr. Trump has falsely claimed for years that millions of noncitizens are illegally registered to vote or have actually cast ballots. Multiple studies have shown the practice is exceedingly rare.
Kiersten Pels, a spokeswoman for the Department of Justice, confirmed that the department sent the letters to “the states we are in active litigation against regarding their failure to provide the full” statewide registered voter list. Ms. Pels did not respond to questions about unspecified criminal investigations.
Calli Jones, a spokeswoman for the Arizona secretary of state’s office, said the office would comply with what the law requires, regardless of any requests from the Justice Department.
“Our office and our counties follow state document retention laws,” Ms. Jones said in an interview, “and to imply otherwise is an insult to the work that election administrators do in Arizona.”
While the states the Justice Department has sued are largely controlled by Democrats, a number of Republican states, including Kentucky, Idaho, West Virginia and Georgia, have also been targeted.
Officials in some of the states being sued, including Maine and Georgia, said they had not yet received a letter from the department.
The new letters come as election officials across the country have faced increasingly hostile rhetoric and threats from the upper echelons of the Trump administration.
Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, sent letters in July to the top election official in all 50 states threatening criminal prosecution if noncitizens cast a ballot that was counted in the midterm elections. Later that month, Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, threatened election officials in a speech, saying they could face prison time if they did not comply with the Trump administration’s efforts to change election policies.
The Trump administration is also actively pleading with the Supreme Court to allow its plans to restrict mail-in voting before the midterms. The Department of Homeland Security is in the midst of a weekslong hunt for noncitizens among the nation’s registered voters despite an absence of evidence of widespread fraud.
Francisco Aguilar, the Democratic secretary of state of Nevada, said that the letters followed a pattern of threats coming from the administration.
“It’s the constant ‘flood the zone’ of harassment and intimidation and threats of legal action hoping we’d fold at some point,” Mr. Aguilar said.
He added, “We’re going to continue to follow the law and do what’s in the best interest of our voters.”
Officials are allowed to destroy voting records 22 months after each election. That date was Sept. 5; the department sent the letters a day prior.
Election officials are well versed in policies regarding document retention, explained David Becker, a former voting rights lawyer for the Justice Department, and such threatening letters are unnecessary. Mr. Becker said the Justice Department may be seeking to pressure the states for more information than is legally necessary.
Sending what is effectively a sternly worded reminder to states two months before an election “is completely meaningless,” Mr. Becker said. “There’s only two reasons to send that letter: Either the lawyers who send it don’t understand litigation obligations, or they’re hoping that states will misinterpret it and retain more than they’re legally required.”
Kellen Browning and Alan Feuer contributed reporting.
Nick Corasaniti is a Times reporter covering national politics, with a focus on voting and elections."
Supreme Court Again Blocks Republican-Backed Missouri Voting Map - The New York Times
Supreme Court Again Blocks Republican-Backed Missouri Voting Map
"The map had been drawn to give Republicans an advantage in the midterm elections. It was not immediately clear how Missouri would proceed.
The Supreme Court on Thursday once again prevented Missouri from using a congressional map in November that was redrawn to give Republicans an advantage in the midterm elections.
It was the second time this week that the Supreme Court waded into a dizzying legal fight over Missouri’s congressional map, and it came just two months before a general election that could determine control of the House.
The court’s brief order did not include any reasoning, as is often the case when the justices respond to emergency requests. There were no noted dissents.
It was not immediately clear how Missouri would proceed. Thursday’s ruling left unanswered how the state would swap congressional maps between a primary and general election.
The state’s Republican leaders had been insisting they would stick with their preferred map, which was used in last month’s primary, for the general election.
The Supreme Court’s ruling landed just as Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Republican, was about to appear at a hearing before Missouri’s Supreme Court, which is considering whether to hold him in contempt for not using the voting boundaries that the state judges prescribed.
Redistricting opponents have suggested in court filings that candidates who won their primaries under the redrawn map might remain the nominees in the same-numbered districts under the old lines. Alternately, they theorized, state law allowed party nominating committees to select candidates for each district.
In response to the Supreme Court’s order, opponents of the new map said the justices’ decision had definitively settled the question of which map will govern the November election.
“The law is the law, the Missouri Constitution is clear as was the Missouri Supreme Court,” Richard von Glahn, the executive director of People Not Politicians Missouri, said in a statement.
Earlier in the week, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh had taken a similar action, as Missouri Democrats briefly appeared to have prevailed in a yearlong fight to preserve a House seat they hold in the Kansas City area. In that order, he deferred to Missouri’s Supreme Court, which had determined state officials should not have adopted the new map without a voter referendum. The state court ruling came even though Missouri voters already used the new map to nominate candidates in last month’s primary contests.
Instead, the state court said Missouri should use a map that had been in place since 2022 for the upcoming election.
But minutes after the justice’s order landed on Tuesday evening, Stephen R. Clark, the chief federal judge in St. Louis, ruled in the opposite direction, ordering the state to use the map that Missouri Republicans drew last year at President Trump’s request. That map was intended to help Republicans flip the seat in Kansas City.
Judge Clark’s ruling came in a different legal case, brought by a Republican congressman who is running for re-election and a G.O.P. candidate who won the primary under the new district lines. That ruling was then appealed again to the Supreme Court, resulting in Thursday’s action.
Judge Clark cited concerns in his ruling that using a different map for the general election would “wreak havoc on the fairness and orderliness” of the congressional election. He wrote that he was concerned a new map would lead to widespread voter confusion.
Mr. Hoskins, along with the governor and the attorney general, then quickly announced that they would follow the district judge’s ruling, rather than the State Supreme Court’s decision. That set off another round of court filings — and contempt proceedings against Mr. Hoskins before the State Supreme Court.
The G.O.P. map was drawn outside the usual redistricting cycle at Mr. Trump’s request, as part of an effort to improve the Republican Party’s chances of holding the House in the 2026 midterms.
The redrawn Missouri map, adopted by the State Legislature in September 2025, divided the core of Kansas City, the state’s largest city, into several districts in an attempt to unseat Representative Emanuel Cleaver II, one of two Democrats in the state’s congressional delegation. The new map did not significantly alter the partisan makeup of the other Democratic-held district, which is in the St. Louis area.
Democrats and state residents opposed to the boundaries last year collected hundreds of thousands of signatures seeking a referendum on the issue. But Mr. Hoskins said he did not believe that redistricting could legally be subject to a voter referendum, and he declined to add it to November’s ballot."
Wednesday, September 09, 2026
JD Vance Doesn’t Want to Help Married Parents. He Wants to Hurt Single Mothers.
Jessica Grose
JD Vance Doesn’t Want to Help Married Parents. He Wants to Hurt Single Mothers.
“You’re reading the Jessica Grose newsletter. A journalist and novelist offers her perspective on the American family, culture, politics and the way we live now.
For years, Vice President JD Vance has railed against universal child care and made snide comments about working families with little ones at home. On Twitter in 2021, he claimed that “normal” non-affluent Americans prefer “a family policy that doesn’t shunt their kids into crap daycare so they can enjoy more ‘freedom’ in the paid labor force.”
Of course, no parents want their kids in “crap daycare.” But what American mothers prefer is far more complicated than Vance’s caricature of the desires of frivolous and wealthy parents who don’t want to care for their own children. According to a November 2025 analysis from the conservative policy and research organization the Institute for Family Studies, a majority of all momswith children under 5, regardless of education level or marital status, prefer to work rather than stay home full time. Unmarried mothers without a college education constitute the group least likely to say their “ideal status” does not involve a job, which makes sense, since single mothers tend to be the most financially vulnerable.
But instead of crafting policy that might help hard-working single mothers — like his own mother — Vance is reportedly championing a federal policy that would take funds earmarked for child care for low-income parents and change the eligibility requirement to include married families with a parent who does not work.
The money, about $9,000 per child, comes from the Department of Health and Human Services. The $12 billion Child Care and Development Fund was created in the 1990s to support low- to moderate-income parents so they could work or get an education. “About 80 percent of the 870,000 families who currently get the child care subsidies have single working parents, most of them mothers, according to Health Department data,” reported my newsroom colleague Coral Davenport. About 40 percent of American children are born to unmarried parents.
The money is currently distributed to states via a block grant, and it typically goes directly to child care providers. The proposal viewed by The Times would not increase the amount of funding, but it would create “the option for a new category of care, parent-based child care, that will allow one married parent to receive C.C.D.F. assistance to care for their own child, while a spouse works at least 35 hours per week.” If this draft rule goes into effect, it will almost certainly hurt child care providers who rely on this funding to stay afloat. And because stay-at-home, married parents will likely be battling for the same pot of funds, it could also prevent single parents from earning money for their families.
In the past Vance has said he approves of unpaid caregivers like grandparents and other relatives in lieu of center-based child care, but the funding under discussion is for stay-at-home spouses. Extended kin would likely not be eligible for the benefit, either, to offset the cost of work they may be foregoing.
This proposal is especially cruel in light of recent cuts to programs that support low-income working families. The Trump administration is already hard at work trying to gut Head Start, a program that provides child care and other services to poor children from up to age 5. First, the administration tried to zero out funding for Head Start in a budget proposal. Then, it illegally withheld funding from the program, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office. Now, it seems to be trying to destroy Head Start by deregulating it, eliminating the program’s requirements to provide disability services, home visits, health screenings and other benefits.
That’s not the only part of the safety net for children that has been shredded. Even as grocery prices continue to rise, the administration’s policies have cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, to the bone. An analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank, suggests that more than one million children have lost food assistance since the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was passed in July 2025 and made it harder to qualify for the program.
Cuts to federal health care also seem to be harming children. According to Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families, enrollment inMedicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program has declined by 2.4 million since January 2025. This suggests that the number of uninsured children is on the rise, Joan Alker, the executive director of the center, noted on X.
While Vance policy’s orientation is pronatalist, the evidence from international experiments of the effects from giving people money to marry or have children is not conclusive. In China, for example, the government has tried to carry out a range of policies, from cash vouchers for newlyweds to baby bonuses, and yet marriage and fertility rates continue to decline. “Marriage registrations in China fell 6.2 percent year on year in the first quarter and are about half 2017 levels,” Reuters reported in May, and the Chinese birthrate is at a record low.
Hungary, where Vance campaigned on behalf of the former prime minister Viktor Orban, adopted some of the most generous family policies in the world, spending over 5 percent of the country’s gross domestic product to boost fertility rates mostly among married, heterosexual parents. The policies did not work in the long run, and Hungary’s fertility rates are about where they started before the pronatalist push.
The state of American family policy is so poor that our federal government could do about a million and one things to help parents that would be more effective and more desired. According to the survey I cited earlier from the Institute for Family Studies, 85 percent of mothers ages 25 to 55 with children under 18 said that paid parental leave would be “extremely” or “very” helpful to them and 80 percent said that child tax credits would be extremely or very helpful to them. Lower-income moms support the tax credit at a higher rate than wealthier moms, while higher-income moms prefer parental leave, but a vast majority of both groups want both of those things.
Few are asking for what Vance and the administration are proposing. While this rule, if it ever goes into effect, might help a small number of one-income, married families in the short term, it could actively harm single and married parents who rely on day care if their centers go into a death spiral from losing a big chunk of federal funding.
I can only conclude that the administration’s plans are either meant to pit stay-at-home parents against working ones, or to punish single parents — and their children — who need support the most.
End Notes
Jon Ronson is one of my favorite nonfiction writers. His 2015 book, “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed,” basically predicted the next decade of culture war cancellations. I highly recommend his new book, “The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men.” When I first saw the title, I admit I inwardly groaned, because I thought it was going to be another “woe-is-men” book. But it’s so much weirder and deeper than that. Unlike many other books about unmoored men, “The Castle” understands that male unhappiness is infectious and has a blast radius. Ronson actually bothers to ask the question: What havoc is male purposeless wreaking “on the lives of their loved ones — their partners, mothers, children?”
Feel free to drop me a line about anything here. Read past editions of the newsletter here.
If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here.
Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.“
Tuesday, September 08, 2026
Monday, September 07, 2026
Opinion | Not So Supreme, Mr. Roberts - The New York Times
Not So Supreme, Mr. Roberts
"It’s crazy to think about Donald Trump outrunning anything.
But in legal terms, the president is an Olympic-class sprinter. He breaks the law so fast that the law is left in his orange dust.
Trump is an outlaw. And our system was not built for an outlaw in the Oval.
He zeros in on loopholes in the law and the system that are based on trust and the assumption that our leaders — and their families — will not be voracious scam artists.
“The Constitution was built on this idea that the president would have enough decency and morality that they just wouldn’t run around exploiting the gaps,” said the Trump biographer Tim O’Brien. “And for Trump, it’s like red meat. This idea that Trump’s mentor was Roy Cohn was profoundly wrong. Donald Trump’s mentor was Fred from day one. His father showed him how to exploit the government system, the legal system and business. His whole worldview is built around the idea that you exploit systems for personal gain, and there’s nothing wrong with doing that because the world’s populated by sharks and you just have to be the biggest shark.”
After running a court that has been complicit in Trump’s defiling our institutions and razing our hallowed spaces, Chief Justice John Roberts seems belatedly alarmed.
“That construction is likely unlawful,” Roberts wrote in his dissent on Monday from his fellow Republican justices’ ruling that the president’s ballroom behemoth — with taxpayers on the hook for over $300 million — can slouch toward completion. Noting that the president was “likely” infringing on Congress, Roberts added, “Today’s decision is no victory for the separation of powers.”
The White House is the People’s House. Chief executives are transient tenants. Its “stately simplicity,” President Teddy Roosevelt once said, “is an expression of the character of the period in which it was built, and is in accord with the purposes it was designed to serve.” Safeguarding it, he said, gave us continuity with our past.
Roberts used that quote in his dissent, as well as a line from Winston Churchill: “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.”
Trump was a builder, but he is such an egotist he can only view buildings — and reflecting pools — as reflections of himself. When he built Trump Tower, he tore down the Art Deco friezes on Bonwit Teller despite promising them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Just so, he bulldozed the East Wing and tore up both of Jackie Kennedy’s gardens before Congress or historic preservationists had a chance to weigh in.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson calls this a “catch me if you can” approach.
The Supreme Court protects the outlandish outlaw by palavering about whether the architectural historian who brought the case has “standing” to do so. Yet shouldn’t any American have standing to challenge Trump’s desecrations? Trump ludicrously blasted the preservationists fighting to stop the ballroom as “TREASONISTS.”
As he casually divides and undermines America, he obsesses on using Krazy Glue to affix gold crap to the walls of the Oval Office or plotting to plant 47 maple trees in Lafayette Park to honor himself. He got us into a war he has no clue how to get out of, yet spends his time mulling redecorating projects, gold gewgaws, his new helipad and his replacement of the asphalt driveway at the White House with granite.
There are so many pathetic scenes of the Supreme Court and Republicans in Congress caving in to Trump — on his war in Iran that he calls “small potatoes” and that JD Vance risibly claims is not a war; on his attempts to disenfranchise voters; on trying to hijack the Postal Service to obstruct those voting by mail; on plotting to sell off a chunk of Yosemite to a private developer; on allowing the killing of endangered wolves and the secret slaughter of wild horses; on trying to slap his name back on the Kennedy Center; on his petty, vindictive renaming of Lake Ontario as “Lake America,” in the midst of the U.S.-Canadian trade war, even though it’s not even named for the Canadian province.
Now Trump is breaking ground for his solipsistic, Napoleonic Triumphal Arch — never mind that it lacks federal approval and that the gold angel on top might endanger planes flying in and out of Reagan National Airport.
O’Brien thinks the most tragic thing is that the Supreme Court now has a con"servative majority that believes in the unitary executive and is getting roadblocks out of the way to give the president more latitude, at the very moment we get a Caligula who desperately needs roadblocks. Roberts issued the ruling in 2024 giving Trump near-total criminal immunity, and that makes him complicit in Trump’s egregious behavior.
Roberts gave Trump the runway, and now he’s objecting. But it’s too late.
“And that’s the lesson of everybody who doesn’t understand who Donald Trump is,” O’Brien said. “He’s simply there to pick your pocket.”
Maureen Dowd is an Opinion columnist for The Times. She won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary. She is the author, most recently, of “Notorious.” @MaureenDowd"
Sunday, September 06, 2026
Trump’s War on Mail-In Ballots Has Voters Baffled. That May Be the Point.
Trump’s War on Mail-In Ballots Has Voters Baffled. That May Be the Point.
“Trump’s executive order and legal efforts on mail-in ballots have caused voter confusion and administrative strain. Judge Talwani blocked the rules, while officials in states like Florida and Arizona urge alternatives. Uncertainty persists before the midterms.
From Oregon to Florida, officials are at once reassuring voters that their ballots are safe and encouraging them to use drop boxes or vote in person.
By Anna GriffinRebecca Fairley RaneyKendal Asbury and David Iversen
President Trump’s legal and rhetorical assault on voting by mail — and the flurry of contradictory court decisions around it — has left voters confused and local officials scrambling just eight weeks before November’s critical midterm elections.
The contortions have county registrars dusting off Election Day contingency plans developed for natural disasters like floods and wildfires. They have struggled to make it through planning meetings before the latest version of the rules change, and many are encouraging voters to avoid the U.S. Postal Service all together.
Among voters, confusion abounds.
“I don’t trust mail-in or in-person, to be honest with you,” said Lori Woo, a 53-year-old teacher from Wildomar, Calif. She has voted both in person and by mail and now wonders whether any of her votes were counted.
Arizona officials have been encouraging voters like Antonio Bergier, an 83-year-old retired geologist, to drop off ballots in person. But he said he didn’t know whether his hometown, Patagonia, or his county, Santa Cruz, had ballot drop boxes — nor would he use them anyway.
Mail, he said, is “the only way they’re getting my vote this year.”
Twenty states are set to mail ballots to voters by Sept. 19, starting with North Carolina, which began sending out absentee ballots on Friday.
“We plan to proceed as planned,” Sam Hayes, the director of North Carolina’s elections board, said at a news conference on Thursday.
But even election officials were reluctant to issue reassuring encomiums.
“I wish that I could tell my constituents to not worry, and I can’t,” said Gabriella Cázares-Kelly, who oversees elections in Pima County, Ariz., where 85 percent of ballots are delivered early or by mail.
In many places with mail-in voting, the bulk of ballots aren’t scheduled to go out for another month. But the response has already begun.
In Los Angeles County, one of the largest voting districts in the nation, elections officers have responded to the uncertainty with ballot distribution and collection plans that were deployed after the devastating Eaton and Palisades wildfires of 2025. Ideas include expanding in-person options like pop-up voting sites, places where people could request and fill out ballots.
“If this is a problem, let’s make it an administrative problem, not a voter problem,” said Dean Logan, the L.A. County registrar. “We do not want voters to be deterred from voting.”
In Arizona, Ms. Cázares-Kelly described a flood of calls from worried voters. During a briefing this week with Arizona’s secretary of state, attorney general and 15 county recorders about the proposed Postal Service mail-ballot rule, news broke of an emergency filing from the Trump administration trying to reinstate parts of the rule a court had blocked.
And in Leon County, Fla., the elections supervisor, Mark Earley, and his team had envelopes with trackable bar codes on every mail ballot, as the Postal Service wanted. But this week, when the county submitted its envelope for inspection, federal officials rejected it. Mr. Earley worries there isn’t enough time to revamp the envelopes, get the Postal Service’s approval and send ballots.
“If the rule goes into effect, we will have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised voters in Florida,” he said. “And nationwide, millions, without a doubt.”
Aubrey Jewett, a political scientist at the University of Central Florida, predicted there would be “chaos” that Florida hasn’t seen since the hanging chads, butterfly ballots and history-making presidential recount of 2000. He plans to drop his own ballot off at his local polling place rather than rely on the mail.
Nearly one in three Americans voted by mail in the last presidential race, and states have broad authority over how elections are conducted. But since his re-election, Mr. Trump, who voted by mail himself twice this year, has pushed to eliminate or severely restrict the option.
He set the current upheaval in motion in March, when he signed an executive order directing the Postal Service to impose new requirements on mailed ballots, including unique bar codes on ballot envelopes and lists from each state identifying voters eligible to receive ballots by mail. The Postal Service has said it could refuse to deliver ballots that do not comply.
A federal judge in Massachusetts temporarily blocked the requirements nationally on Aug. 28 while she considered whether to issue a longer injunction. That decision came four days after a divided Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to move forward with its plans.
On Thursday in an emergency appeal, the Trump administration again asked the Supreme Court to let it move ahead, hours after the judge in Massachusetts, Indira Talwani, expressed concern that the plans could cause so much chaos in the coming elections that states would experience “major disenfranchisement.”
On Friday evening, Judge Talwani intervened for a third time, ruling that the administration’s plans are likely illegal and should not be implemented ahead of the midterms.
Meantime, a Postal Service whistle-blower said last week that the agency was rushing to build the computer system needed to enforce the new requirements in violation of court orders.
A White House spokeswoman, Lauren Bis, said any confusion around the fall elections “was caused by radical Democrats’ litigation” over “common-sense measures” to ensure election security. She accused Democrats of refusing to guarantee that “Americans, and only Americans, decide our elections.”
U.S. intelligence agencies and independent election security experts have found no credible evidence that any foreign government has successfully manipulated, altered or intercepted mail-in ballots.
Still, voters across the country are preparing for November without knowing what the rules will be. In Clark County, Wash., part of a swing House district along the state’s southern border, the elections office receives a dozen or so calls and emails a day from anxious constituents.
“The biggest thing they want to know is if things are going to change,” said Rich Cooper, the county elections manager. “We have to tell them we just don’t know yet.”
Mr. Trump has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that widespread fraud is inherent in voting by mail. He declared in March that “mail-in voting means mail-in cheating.”
Democrats and some election regulators say even if the Postal Service doesn’t succeed with its rules this year, the uncertainty and frustration already created are the point.
“This White House is making it so hard for people to participate in the democratic process,” said Hector Sánchez Barba, who runs Mi Familia Vota, an Arizona nonprofit that helps Latino and immigrant communities engage in politics.
The befuddlement crosses party lines. Yvette Avera, a 62-year-old Republican in Temecula, Calif., usually votes by mail but has already told her family they should vote in person this year. “If I do it in person, I’ve got myself covered,” she said.
Some people have only one option. Michelle Coppadge, 54, of Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif., said she would rather vote at a polling place “where they’re verifying who you are.” But her 94-year-old mother-in-law will not be able to vote if mail-in balloting goes away because “she just doesn’t leave her home.”
The first extensive experiments with mailed ballots were in the 1980s, led by Republican leaders in rural Oregon who wanted to increase participation where voting at a centralized polling place meant long drives, often in rotten weather. Today, some Republicans blame Democratic dominance in West Coast states on the ease of mail-in balloting.
Some of the biggest fights and steepest confusion over remote voting this year are in states that could decide which party controls Congress, such as Michigan, with its heated Senate race, and Pennsylvania with its three tossup House seats.
Adia Harbert, 19, attends the University of Central Florida but is registered to vote back home in Coopersburg, Pa., where Democrats hope to unseat the freshman Representative Ryan Mackenzie, a Republican.
She said she’s eager to vote this fall but can’t fly home for the election and is worried she won’t be able to figure out the vote-by-mail system in time.
“Voting by mail is basically my only option,” she said.
The uncertainty reminds Eric Traibin, a lawyer in Orlando, Fla., of 2000, when Florida left the outcome of the presidential race unresolved for more than a month.
He said he believes mail-in balloting is safe, but still plans to vote at the polls.
“I’m just a very neurotic person,” he said.
Election officials say they’re doing the best they can to ensure the legal fights over mail voting don’t scare off or disenfranchise would-be voters, but compliance with whatever rules the Trump administration settles on has been a struggle.
So some election officials are urging voters to go back to the old ways, mixing their messages of reassurances with pleas to change voting behavior. Oregon’s secretary of state, for example, is asking state legislators for money to add ballot drop boxes and plans to encourage people to use them rather than rely on the mail.
In Alaska, many rural villages count on the Postal Service to deliver full polling places, not just ballots. This year, it’s home to one of the most hotly contested Senate races in the country.
“Even if you want to vote in person, they have to mail the literal ballot box, the voting stands with the flags on them, the pins, the stickers, the ballots, everything,” said Michelle Sparck, director of Get Out the Native Vote, a nonprofit. “This is in places where you can go three weeks without mail if the weather turns or your village clerk gets sick.”
Four years ago, the Postal Service failed to deliver ballots from six western Alaska villages in time to be counted. This year, Ms. Sparck’s organization is urging voters to request ballots early, return them as soon as possible and, when in doubt, ask their local postal clerks to hand-cancel envelopes.
“We are already struggling with some skepticism and apathy,” she said. “It doesn’t seem like any lessons have been learned.”
Reporting was contributed by Eduardo Medina, Eric Adelson and Valerie Crowder.
Anna Griffin is the Pacific Northwest bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of Washington, Idaho, Alaska, Montana and Oregon.“
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