Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox.
On Monday the Supreme Court rejected President Trump’s efforts to restrict mail ballots ahead of the November midterms. Trump said that restricting votes by mail will help his party in the upcoming midterms. Election administration experts say there is no evidence to support Trump’s fearmongering about mail-in voter fraud. The high court’s decision allows states to continue sending out mail ballots without any changes to their administration systems.
In this edition of the Rural Index, I’m using the recent chaos surrounding Trump’s mail ballot orders as a jumping off point to dispel myths about voter fraud and to discuss what makes mail-in voting particularly important to some rural voters.
But first, a bit of recent history.
Back in March, President Trump passed Executive Order (EO) I4399, which mandated that only eligible voters should receive mail ballots. On paper, this sounds like a good plan, but election experts say that vote-by-mail fraud is already extremely rare. More on that later. Trump’s proposed implementation is dangerous and undemocratic. More on that later, too.
In August, the Supreme Court paused a lower court ruling that blocked parts of Trump’s EO, saying that it was too early to sue because the states opposing Trump’s order, which consisted of mostly Democrat-led blue states, had not yet been harmed.
Here is a quick timeline of events:
March 31, 2026: Trump passes EO I4399
August 24, 2026: The Supreme Court paused a lower court ruling that blocked parts of Trump’s executive order. While it did not weigh in on the legality of his order, it did say the states that opposed the order could not challenge the order when they did. It was too early to rule because states had not yet suffered an injury.
September 6, 2026: The Supreme Court considered whether U.S. District Judge Judge Talwani’s injunction should be lifted.
September 7, 2026: In their amicus brief, a group of lawmakers wrote that the Constitution gives states the power to regulate elections, not the executive branch.
September 14, 2026: The Supreme Court rejected certain aspects of Trump’s effort to restrict mail ballots.
In a brief concurrence, Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed to deny Trump’s effort to restrict mail ballots, saying that election officials did not have enough time to implement the rule before November, but that he might rule in favor of the Trump administration at a later date.
Voting by Mail in North Carolina
The following map shows the mail ballot rates from the last presidential election in North Carolina’s nonmetropolitan, or rural, counties. In North Carolina, any registered voter in North Carolina can request an absentee ballot at least two weeks prior to the election.
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In the 2024 general election, about 5.7% of metropolitan voters and 3.8% of nonmetro voters cast ballots by mail. (Keep in mind that this data is only from one election, and may not broadly reflect mail-in voting trends that can vary from cycle to cycle for a variety of factors.)
North Carolina has far lower mail ballot rates compared to other states, but as a key battleground state in the Senate this year, small margins could have outsized consequences.
Data on mail ballots are collected at the state level, so creating a nation-wide map would require more time than I had available this week. I chose to zoom in on North Carolina not only because it is my home state, but because it has been one of the states at the center of the mail ballot controversy this election cycle.
On September 4, 2026, the North Carolina State Board of Elections added its own restrictions to their mail ballot system, requiring officials to throw out ballots with unsealed envelopes and prohibiting anyone except a legal guardian or close relative from dropping off ballots on behalf of another voter. Voting rights advocates say that this will disenfranchise voters with disabilities and those without reliable access to the internet.
The Technicalities of Trump’s EO: Rural Disenfranchisement
After Trump’s bid to restrict voting by mail, election experts and voting rights advocates warned that the administration’s plan wouldn’t even be good at accomplishing its expressed intent – preventing voting fraud by mail.
In a phone interview with the Daily Yonder, election administration expert Lisa Bryant (Ph.D.) said that the Trump administration’s system of identifying eligible voters would produce both false positives and false negatives. “We would likely see a large number of people identified as not being eligible [to vote] who, in fact, are eligible,” said Bryant, who is the chair of the Political Science Department at Fresno.
If the Supreme Court did rule in favor of Trump’s EO, it would have required states to send lists of eligible voters from their own voter rolls to the federal government. The federal government would then match their voting records to several federal databases, like the Social Security Administration. And only voters with matched information in federal databases would be eligible to receive ballots in the mail.
Errors can occur in this process because file structures are organized differently, collecting different information across various states, which makes it hard to cross reference voter data. Voter files are also living documents, constantly being updated as people register to vote, move, change their name, or make other updates to their registration information.
And in remote rural places in particular, this can be very challenging.
“A lot of rural places have rural routes and things like that,” said Bryant. “So the street address might not match up exactly either. A lot of homes on reservations don’t have street addresses.”
Bryant said that on some reservations in her home state of New Mexico, for example, voters may draw a map of their house if they don’t have a street address. Election officials can scan these maps and collect them in their voter files. But it’s impossible to match a hand-drawn map to a federal database with millions of records. “So it’s not as easy as it appears on the surface,” said Bryant.
Bryant said that the risk of mail fraud is already very low. She said there are safeguards in place to prevent it, like signature verifications and requirements mandating that voters include identifying information on the outside of their ballot, like their date of birth and the last four digits of their social security number.
A Brennan Center analysis found that incident rates of voter fraud are somewhere between 0.0003 and 0.0025%. And when fraud does occur, it usually stems from administrative errors and bad data matching.
Sewing Chaos
In an interview with The Conversation, president of Dickinson College and former federal court judge John E. Jones III said the recent Supreme Court case had “the potential, if decided in a certain way, to interfere with the franchise of voting in a way that the federal government has never attempted to do, and certainly the president has never attempted to do before. It literally could disenfranchise thousands and thousands of voters, depending on where the decision lands.”
Bryant said that these changes have been sewing chaos and uncertainty among voters who may not be sure that their ballot will count, or whether their usual voting method will have to change.
And the burden that chaos places on local election administrators is also outrageous.
At the beginning of this fiasco, I tried contacting local election officials from North Carolina, asking if they could offer insight into how implementing Trump’s EO might burden their boards of election, but to no avail. Things were evolving too quickly and with too much complexity. In a statement to voters, the North Carolina State Board of Elections said that the “county boards of elections plan to send out absentee ballots to North Carolina voters who have requested them for this election, starting September 4, as required by state law. If it becomes necessary, we will do our best to comply with any court decisions, as we always do.”
The post Trump’s Attempt to Restrict Mail Ballots Sewed Chaos Ahead of November Midterms appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
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