Election expert on the impact of Trump's appeal to SCOTUS on mail-in ballots

+ Elections Election expert on the impact of Trump's appeal to SCOTUS on mail-in ballots September 4, 20263:58 AM ET Heard on Morning Edition Steve Inskeep Election expert on the impact of Trump's appeal to SCOTUS on mail-in ballots Listen &middot; 4:56 4:56 Transcript Toggle more options Download Embed Embed "> <iframe src="https://www.npr.org/player/embed/nx-s1-5956866/nx-s1-9913734" width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="NPR embedded audio player"> Transcript NPR's Steve Inskeep asks David Becker, an elections administration expert, what effect the Trump administration's appeal to the Supreme Court on mail-in ballots could have on the midterms. Sponsor Message Transcript STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Since this case keeps coming before the Supreme Court, we keep calling David Becker. He's the founder and executive director of the Center For Election Innovation & Research, which is a nonpartisan organization that focuses on election administration. Mr. Becker, welcome back.

+ DAVID BECKER: Oh, good morning, Steve. INSKEEP: I think we're costing you some sleep... BECKER: (Laughter). INSKEEP: ...Cumulatively here. Is there still time to install this Postal Service system in the 2026 election if the Supreme Court allows it? BECKER: The short answer is no. And that's a virtually unanimous opinion of election officials all over the country. States submitted declarations from election officials from about two dozen states saying, we just can't do it. There's no way to comply with this, even if it was legal. And it's not. There was an amicus brief filed yesterday in the District of Columbia that my organization helped organize with nearly a hundred election officials from all over the country, Republicans and Democrats, saying the same thing. And honestly, the Postal Service admits this. While the administration is claiming in the Supreme Court that they will be harmed if the - if North Carolina is allowed to begin sending mail ballots out today at the same time, as Hansi mentioned, the Postal Service admits they're not ready to start implementing this order. They're not ready to do the things that they themselves have said they're going to do until, at the earliest, next week. So the states couldn't comply even if they wanted to right now. But the good news is while this might seem to be chaos, the states are still moving forward with mail balloting, and voters are likely to see no changes in mail balloting this year. INSKEEP: You said that Republicans as well as Democrats have objected or said that this case is - this effort is practically impossible. Are you asserting that this is a completely bipartisan objection based on facts rather than ideology? BECKER: I think that's accurate. I mean, of course, there are some who might agree with the president, but, you know, the states who agree with the president have theoretically had several weeks now where they could have voluntarily chosen to comply with this order. The temporary restraining order issued by a court in Boston only restrained the mandatory implementation of these rules in this order, allowed states to voluntarily comply. And to my knowledge, not a single state has chosen to do that right now, even those states that are allied with the president. INSKEEP: Now, it's tricky to assess what the Supreme Court might do, but you have to consider this possibility. Is it possible that the Supreme Court in considering the administration's appeal would do roughly as they did with tariffs last year? Let the administration do what it wants. The president is the president. He gets to do what he wants, and we'll rule on its legality next year. BECKER: I mean, I think you can never rule anything out here, but I think it's almost certain that there are not five justices on the Supreme Court who are ready to own the chaos that would result from implementing a radical change in process implemented from Washington at this late date. Even election officials in deeply red states are opposed to this. And the rules that the Postal Service are proposing here, one of the rules that the whistleblower that Hansi mentioned revealed was that they would impose a zero-error-rate requirement on the states, meaning that even if they had a typographical error on a single envelope in a batch of 10,000, they would reject the entire batch of 10,000, meaning thousands of valid mail ballots. That's likely illegal. It would cause absolute chaos. I don't see any way that there are five justices on the Supreme Court who are going to own that chaos, and I am very, very confident that those who choose to vote by mail this fall are going to find the same convenient, safe, secure system they've been using for the past several elections. INSKEEP: Can you help me with one other thing here? When we last spoke, you said this Postal Service system is not practical, also, that it is not legal. But then you said, you know, if you're concerned about mail-in ballot security, there are already safeguards. What are they? BECKER: Yeah, there are multiple safeguards. Every single mail ballot is checked before it goes out against the voter list to make sure the person is eligible and is supposed to receive it. When the ballot comes back in, it's checked again for identity to make sure that it's been returned by the right person, usually by a signature match, sometimes by an ID match in different states. And also, there are fraud checks to make sure that no one else has voted on behalf of that voter to make sure there's no way that someone else could have returned it. We've been doing this since the... INSKEEP: Just so I understand all those checks - these are done at the state level, basically, or at the county local level? BECKER: Yeah, exactly, all at the state and local level, which is how it's been done since at least the Civil War. We've been doing this for a very long time. So, I mean, we should expect that our mail voting process is secure. It led to secure elections that withstood scrutiny in 2024, which President Trump won. It led to a secure election in 2020, which President Trump lost. Both of those elections survived all of the scrutiny that were applied to them, and I think we're going to see that in 2026. INSKEEP: David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. Thanks so much. BECKER: Thank you, Steve. Copyright &copy; 2026 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. Transcript text may be revised to correct errors or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org may be edited after its original broadcast or publication. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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