By Amy O’Kruk, Rhyannon Bartlett-Imadegawa

(CNN) — Mail-in voting in the 2026 midterm elections officially begins Friday in North Carolina, even as the rules governing those votes remain uncertain amid an ongoing legal fight.

A federal judge has, for now, temporarily blocked the US Postal Service from enforcing new mail-in voting requirements stemming from a sweeping executive order signed by President Donald Trump in March. The pause came days after the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration could begin implementing parts of the order.

Beyond the legal uncertainty, the effort is facing internal concerns at USPS. A whistleblower report alleges that USPS officials have flagged significant IT concerns about a new system for verifying mail ballots.

Voting by mail has grown significantly and has become a popular and well-established part of US elections over the past two decades. States set their own rules for who can vote by mail, creating a patchwork of policies that has shifted considerably over the past two decades.

In 2000, 21 states allowed any voter to cast a ballot by mail. Today, 37 states and the District of Columbia do, while another 13 states offer mail voting with some restrictions, according to the Center for Election Innovation & Research.

As access to mail voting has expanded, so has the annual number of ballots cast. Mail voting surged during the pandemic-era 2020 election, and millions of Americans have continued to cast their ballots by mail in federal elections.

Changing how mail ballots are handled could have implications for tens of millions of voters and for election officials preparing to administer voting.

Voters who said they used mail-in ballots in 2024 tended to be older and more likely to live in urban or suburban settings compared to the overall voting population, according to a 2024 post-election survey by Pew Research Center.

In some states like Mississippi, voters can qualify for a mail-in ballot based on being aged 65 or over.

Political preferences differ between people who vote by mail and people who vote in person, the same Pew survey suggests.

In 2024, 61% of voters who reported voting by mail-in ballot said they supported Kamala Harris for president, a higher share than those who voted in person, both early or on Election Day. The Harris support among mail-in voters was higher than her share of the popular vote.

Trump’s March order aiming to rein in mail-in voting follows years of him making unsubstantiated claims about illegal voting by mail. With such little time before the fall elections, the legal challenges could prevent some or all of Trump’s intended changes from taking effect this November.

“There’s no way to implement (the executive order),” David Becker, a former Justice Department lawyer who now leads the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research, told CNN. “This would be a sweeping seizure of election power from the states under any circumstances. It would be hard to do this with two or four years of advance notice. It is impossible to do that with about 70 days.”

The-CNN-Wire
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