Trump's mail-in ballot rule could cost 'military personnel and their family members' their vote, ex-national security leaders warn

The Trump administration is on the verge of disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of overseas voters, including "military personnel and their family members," a group of former national security leaders warned in a Tuesday court filing.

In a 38-page amicus brief, the National Security Leaders for America (NSLA) says the new ballot mail rule proposed by the Postal Service (USPS) is broadly "unlawful" and specifically runs afoul of "protections Congress guaranteed" to uniformed and other overseas voters.

"[A]llowing USPS to implement the Final Rule would create an imminent risk that military personnel and their families serving away from their legal residences and diplomats and other eligible voters living abroad will be effectively disenfranchised," the brief reads.

Since March, the government has been trying to effectuate President Donald Trump's executive order directing the USPS to substantially restrict vote-by-mail systems by federalizing ballot envelopes.

In various litigation, states and groups have sued to keep the new policy enjoined and, to varying degrees, have won — at least for the upcoming midterms. The policy, however, only became formalized as an internal USPS rule in late August and effectively reset all the ongoing lawsuits. But as Election Day nears, the pace of motions practice, court rulings, and appellate filings has become turbocharged.

Last week, in her latest ruling on the policy, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, a Barack Obama appointee, dissolved a temporary restraining order (TRO) and replaced it with a preliminary injunction. The Trump administration, for its part, immediately filed a notice of appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit — but was already in the process of seeking a stay pending appeal of the earlier TRO.

Now, the national security leaders insist the government has simply not been honest about the upshot of the new USPS rule.

"Although the Final Rule nominally purports to exempt [overseas] ballots from its implementation of [the rule's] unlawful requirements, the exclusion is neither developed nor workable," the filing goes on.

To hear the 1,500-plus members of NSLA tell it, the "new barcode-and-enrollment regime for ballot mail" required by the USPS rule is set to be "implemented on a compressed election-year timeline" and will directly "interfere" with the federal law protecting military voters.

The amicus brief points to the absence of any reference to that law in the government's filed efforts to overturn Talwani's injunctions.

"Confirming that the Final Rule's exclusion for [overseas] ballots is fictional, the Government's Motion omits any mention of it," the filing continues. "The Government thus leaves the admitted conflict between [the overseas ballot law] and the Postal Service's ballot-blocking policy entirely unaddressed."

The national security group goes on to say the rule "is ultra vires and cannot be lawfully implemented because it would impose envelope formatting requirements" on the states that the overseas ballot law "expressly prohibits."

That is, the group says the "barcode-and-enrollment policy" contains "no plausibly effective procedures" to ensure ballots mailed by overseas voters will pass muster under the rule at a basic level.

The group also says the circumstances of the upcoming election render the rule unworkable in the near term.

The filing elaborates:

[I]mplementation of the Final Rule would inject confusion and operational disruption into military and diplomatic and other overseas voting at the very time when State officials, under express requirements of the statute, must distribute, receive, and count [overseas] ballots. The processes prescribed to protect [overseas] voters preclude any realistic conclusion that there will be adequate time to resolve the conflicts and uncertainties associated with the Final Rule's ballot procedures before the November 3, 2026, general election.

And the problems would only snowball at this point for military voters and others similarly situated, the group argues. While those problems are likely to affect voters writ large, they pose particular problems to overseas voters, the amicus brief alleges.

"A domestic voter whose mail ballot is rejected retains some recourse; she may vote in person, seek a provisional ballot, or return to her local election office to resolve a registration problem before Election Day," the filing goes on. "[An overseas] voter may have none of these options. She cannot appear at a polling place thousands of miles away, and once her ballot is transmitted under the schedule [the overseas ballot law] requires, the calendar ordinarily leaves no time to receive a rejection notice, obtain a compliant envelope or enrollment, and return a replacement ballot before its deadline."