1. United States
2. Va.
3. Letter

The Trump administration told the Supreme Court this week that USPS will not withhold mail ballots. What it did not lead with is what USPS will do instead. USPS confirmed in its own filing that it will provide federal law enforcement with a list of every American who votes by mail — along with the unique barcode data tied to their ballot. Let that sink in. The federal government is building a surveillance database of every American who chooses to vote by mail. Not suspected criminals. Not people under investigation. Ordinary citizens exercising their constitutional right to vote — logged, tracked, barcoded, and handed to law enforcement. The Secret Ballot has been a cornerstone of American democracy since the 19th century. It exists precisely to protect voters from intimidation, retaliation, and coercion. It exists because a government that knows how you vote — or even that you voted — is a government with power over you. This administration has already used the Department of Justice to target political opponents. It has weaponized the FBI and IRS against nonprofits under NSPM-7. It has detained a decorated Air Force officer for speaking out. It has raided the offices of Democratic state lawmakers. And now it wants a list of everyone who votes by mail, tied to unique barcode identifiers, delivered directly to federal law enforcement. This is not election security. This is the infrastructure of a surveillance state being built around the act of voting itself. We demand that Congress immediately investigate USPS’s plan to share mail voter data with federal law enforcement, pass legislation explicitly prohibiting the federal government from tracking individual voting methods, and tell the American people clearly: your ballot is secret, your vote is private, and Congress will keep it that way. The right to vote means nothing if the act of voting makes you a target.