Heritage Foundation’s Ken Cuccinelli on Trump’s mail-in voting executive order: “Depositing so much responsibility for our elections in the Postal Service strikes me as very unwise”
Cuccinelli: “I think that the Postal Service is an agency that all of America understands is not terribly capable. … It doesn’t surprise me that here at the beginning of September, … they would struggle with this timeline for this election.”
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From the September 8, 2026, edition of C-Span's Washington Journal
MIMI GEERGES (HOST): On mail-in ballots, Ken, the president signed an executive order. On mail-in ballots, It's called “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections." How would this differ from current procedures?
KEN CUCCINELLI (GUEST): Well, the main difference in current procedures is that the Postal Service will have to actually track and police all of the incoming and outgoing ballots that they're asked to handle by the states. And that's a major change. It'll allow you to do things like track your ballot, like you can track your package on Amazon. The objections are that it includes providing voter rolls by states to the Postal Service so that they can do the tracking. And the president is presumably going this route because the Postal Service is a federal agency over which he has authority, and he does not -- you know, he can't tell states how to run their elections. He can tell the Postal Service how to operate.
GEERGES: So on that, it's not just the post office tracking the ballots. It's actually deciding who gets a ballot.
CUCCINELLI: Right.
GEERGES: So do you fear that this might disenfranchise valid legal voters?
CUCCINELLI: No. I'm not worried about valid legal voters. They can only do that by matching it with the voter rolls. I think the real contest here is between states that don't want to cooperate with the president's policy here, and obviously the president, because those voter rolls are a big deal. And so it's it shouldn't be hard to match mail to the voter rolls.
The real issue is whether a state is willing to hand over its voter rolls to the Postal Service, and there's a big fight about that. This has been enjoined literally within hours by a judge in Massachusetts. And so we'll have to see how that plays out.
GEERGES: And the administration has asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on that. But NPR has an article saying that a whistleblower has come forward this week alleging that the U.S. postal service isn't ready to implement the rules that the president has ordered and that it would essentially harm the coming midterm elections because the Postal Service would be able to do all of that. What are your thoughts on that and do you think that it's too close to the midterm elections to start implementing these major changes in mail-in voting?
CUCCINELLI: So, I'm not surprised by that. I have other litigation going where I'm talking to some of the senior directors of election in Virginia, and they're in Democrat cities. And for years, they have advised their constituents to not use mail voting at all because in every election, they literally have votes that never show up. Forget late. They just never show up.
So, you know, I think that the Postal Service is an agency that all of America understands is not terribly capable. And depositing so much responsibility for our elections in the Postal Service strikes me as very unwise. So, it doesn't surprise me that here at the beginning of September, two months before Election Day, and only about two weeks before voting begins — Minnesota's the earliest voting state, 46 days before election day — that they would struggle with this timeline for this election.