USPS halts Trump mail-ballot computer system after Supreme Court injunction

The United States Postal Service has stopped work on a computer system that President Donald Trump ordered as a gate for mail ballots, Postmaster General David Steiner told the Associated Press on Thursday. “There’s an injunction so we’re not doing anything,” he said. A memo to the workforce on Wednesday, obtained by AP, told staff the agency “will not be enforcing any of these new rules in the 2026 federal election” and that election mail is “business as usual.”

The Supreme Court this week left in place a lower-court block on the March executive order. That order told federal agencies to build state citizenship lists and feed them into a Postal Service portal. USPS would then have been allowed to send mail ballots only to voters who cleared the portal. Steiner said he learned of the order about a month before it was published and treated it as an execution problem, not a policy argument. “I don’t get to decide what rules that are put on us that I decide to accept or not accept,” he said.

A whistleblower report released this month by Senator Richard Blumenthal said the system was built in a rush and full of errors. Steiner said he had read portions of the report and accepted that a platform of that size was hard to stand up quickly. He also said he trusted the team on the project and had planned to show it around 15 September.

In-person early voting for the midterms has already started in some states. The postal service is still the main carrier for millions of mail ballots. Steiner used the AP interview to warn about postmark delays. He asked voters to send ballots early. That advice is separate from the blocked portal. It is the operational risk that remains after the legal risk is paused.

Trump has spent the year trying to shrink mail voting. The Postal Service was an unusual place to put the filter. Citizenship lists are a state and federal election-administration job. Putting them inside a postal portal would have given a delivery agency a veto on who received a ballot. The injunction removes that veto for 2026. It does not settle the underlying statute fight, and it does not speed up a letter that is mailed late.

Steiner arrived at USPS from Waste Management. The AP account describes a year spent on political and financial pressure. The portal was the most visible political file. With the court order in force, the visible file is now ordinary election mail: collection times, postmarks, and whether a ballot mailed in the last week still arrives by the state deadline.

States that rely heavily on mail ballots will treat Friday as a return to the old checklist. States that wanted the federal portal will have to use their own voter rolls. The midterm calendar will not wait for a later appeal. Steiner’s sentence is the policy as it stands: the injunction is in place, and the Postal Service is not building the system.