Virginia opens 45 days of midterm voting with Trump’s mail-ballot order still blocked

Virginia voters began casting midterm ballots on Friday, the first large state to open a full early-voting window for the 3 November election. The Department of Elections told localities that registrar offices closed on Saturday 19 September must offer voting on the 18th. The official 45-day period runs through Saturday 31 October.

The federal races on the ballot are a U.S. Senate seat and all 11 House districts. Three proposed amendments to the state constitution sit beside them. Some localities also have municipal races, referendums and special elections. No excuse is required for early in-person voting. Voters go to the designated office or satellite site for the locality where they are registered and present an accepted identification.

What is new on the calendar

Sunday in-person voting is required this year on the second and third Sundays before Election Day, in addition to the two Saturdays already on the books. The weekend dates are Sunday 18 October, Saturday 24 October, Sunday 25 October and Saturday 31 October. Curbside voting remains available for voters with disabilities and for those over 65.

Registration can be updated through Friday 23 October. After that date a voter may still register and cast a provisional ballot under the state's same-day rules. Sample ballots and office addresses are posted on the Department of Elections site.

Associated Press reporting from Henrico framed Friday as the start of the last six weeks in which Americans will decide who runs Congress through a cost-of-living squeeze and a war with Iran that is in its seventh month. Virginia is not a perfect mirror of the national map. It is the first big laboratory because its early window is long, its identification rule is settled, and its suburbs have moved in both directions over the past three cycles.

The mail-ballot order that is not in force

The opening day landed four days after the Supreme Court blocked a March executive order that would have limited mail ballots to voters cleared on federal citizenship lists. Postmaster General David Steiner told the Associated Press that the Postal Service has stopped work on the computer system built for that order. A staff memo said the new rules will not apply to the 2026 federal election.

Virginia's early-vote operation does not depend on that system. It does depend on the legal weather around it. Election officials in both parties spent the week telling voters that mail ballots already requested will be processed under the old rules, and that Friday's in-person sites are open regardless of what happens to the injunction later in the autumn.

Lawsuits filed this month argue that repeated public suggestions of federal officers at polling places amount to illegal intimidation. Those cases will not be decided before the first Virginia ballots are in the scanner. The practical instruction from Richmond is narrower: the sites are open, the ID list has not changed, and the Sunday hours in October are now mandatory rather than optional.