Yesterday’s post was about junk drawers — about what happens when you ask a classification system to sort an unruly world in real time, and about the organizational costs of pretending the system is tidier than it is. I had barely finished writing it when I came across a news story from two weeks ago that I had, somehow, missed. On March 31, the President signed an executive order giving the U.S. Postal Service a new job. The USPS already operates one of the most complex real-time classification and routing systems in human history — sorting hundreds of millions of pieces of mail every day by destination, class, and delivery priority, mostly without opening any of it. The executive order asks it to add one more classification to that operation: ballot versus not-ballot. The problem, as we will see, is that this particular classification requires information the USPS cannot obtain without the cooperation of the very party the order is designed to constrain.
There is a reason we do not simply ask passengers whether they are carrying anything improper before they board an aircraft. It is not because we assume all passengers are threats — the overwhelming majority are not. It is because any screening system that relies on the screened party to provide the key screening information cannot distinguish between honest and dishonest reporters, and the dishonest reporters are exactly the population the screening is designed to catch. Self-certification is not independent verification. This is not a partisan observation about airports or about elections. It is a structural one about what screening can and cannot do.
On March 31, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.” The order’s central mechanism works as follows. States must compile a registry of voters eligible to receive mail ballots and submit it to the U.S. Postal Service at least sixty days before each federal election. USPS is then directed to transmit mail-in ballots only to voters on that list. To make the ballots identifiable in transit, the order requires states to use official ballot envelopes marked with unique bar codes. The bar code is how USPS knows it is looking at a ballot. The bar code is how USPS knows whether to deliver it. Three lawsuits were filed within days of the signing, arguing — consistent with how courts ruled when blocking much of a similar 2025 elections order — that the Constitution’s Elections Clause reserves the rules for federal elections to state legislatures and Congress, not the executive branch.1
Set the constitutional question aside for a moment and consider a more basic one: what happens when a state disagrees with the federal eligibility determination and simply does not use the official envelope?
The U.S. Postal Service processes hundreds of millions of pieces of mail every day. It does not open them. It cannot inspect their contents. Its ability to identify a piece of mail as a ballot depends entirely on that piece of mail being labeled as a ballot — which, under this order, means it depends on the state having placed it in the official bar-coded envelope. A state that wants to send a ballot to a voter the federal list excludes can simply send that ballot in a plain envelope. USPS will see a piece of mail. It will deliver a piece of mail. It will never know it was a ballot. The National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association made a version of this point when their president said plainly: “The Postal Service is not an election enforcement agency.”
The official bar-coded envelope does offer one thing a plain envelope does not: priority handling within the USPS network — expedited processing, faster routing, higher visibility in the mail stream. This is a genuine advantage, but only if the ballot reaches its destination. For a voter the federal list excludes, the bar code ensures the ballot will be identified and withheld. The only thing the official envelope expedites, in that case, is non-delivery. For every voter a state wants to reach but the federal list excludes, not using the official envelope is strictly better: the ballot arrives, and USPS never knows it was a ballot. The scanner never sees it because there is nothing to see.
This is, it turns out, not a hypothetical. Many people already solve exactly this problem in their everyday lives: people who mail checks routinely wrap them in a plain sheet of paper or use opaque envelopes precisely because announcing the contents invites theft. The rational response to a labeling rule that exposes valuable contents to interception is to not label. A state government that declines to place its ballots in the official federal envelope is making the same calculation as the person who wraps their rent check in a blank piece of paper. It is not even slightly devious. It is just prudent.
The impossibility has not been resolved; it has been conserved — relocated from the question of who gets a ballot to the question of whether the ballot-sender has any incentive to cooperate with its own screening. It does not. Regular readers will recognize the structure.
There is more to say about what happens to the ballots the system formally rejects — the ones that are correctly identified but barred from delivery — and where those go, which is a question the order declines to answer. A classification system that specifies what it will not process but says nothing about what becomes of the unprocessed is missing a drawer. That is a different post, and it is coming. For today, the airport is enough.
With that, I leave you with this.
1 The Elections Clause (Article I, Section 4) provides that the rules for federal elections “shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof,” with Congress retaining authority to “make or alter such Regulations.” Courts have held that this structure leaves the executive branch with limited independent authority to rewrite election administration rules — a point several federal judges made explicitly in blocking provisions of the March 2025 elections order. Whether USPS’s status as an independent agency creates an additional barrier to executive direction is a separate question currently being litigated.
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