What are the key takeaways from this The Daily (NYT) episode?

Key insights include: **Mail voting scale:** Approximately 30% of Americans — tens of millions of voters — cast ballots by mail in 2024, with 8 states conducting elections almost entirely through mail. Voters in those states face the highest exposure to disruption if the executive order survives legal challenge, making this far more than a procedural dispute.; **The compliance trap:** The executive order requires states to upload eligible voter lists to a USPS portal before any mail ballots can be sent. States that don't comply receive zero mail ballots. With no portal yet operational and fewer than 60 days before the election, compliance is practically impossible regardless of political willingness.; **Constitutional boundary:** The U.S. Constitution grants the executive branch zero explicit authority over elections — time, place, and manner are reserved for states. Federal district courts and one appeals court have already ruled the executive order unlawful on these grounds, with a Massachusetts judge explicitly underlining the words "does not" in her ruling.

What did Nick Coraciniti discuss on The Daily (NYT)?

NYT reporter Nick Corasaniti examines Trump's executive order weaponizing the U.S. Postal Service to restrict mail-in voting weeks before midterm elections. Nearly 30% of Americans vote by mail, and 8 states run elections almost entirely that way, making the legal battle before the Supreme Court consequential for tens of millions of voters. Key topics include: **Mail voting scale:** Approximately 30% of Americans — tens of millions of voters — cast ballots by mail in 2024, with 8 states conducting elections almost entirely through mail. Voters in those states face the highest exposure to disruption if the executive order survives legal challenge, making this far more than a procedural dispute.; **The compliance trap:** The executive order requires states to upload eligible voter lists to a USPS portal before any mail ballots can be sent. States that don't comply receive zero mail ballots. With no portal yet operational and fewer than 60 days before the election, compliance is practically impossible regardless of political willingness..

How long is this episode of The Daily (NYT)?

This episode is 27 minutes long. SignalCast provides an AI-generated summary so you can get the key insights in about 3 minutes.

The Daily (NYT)

Trump’s War on Mail-In Voting

September 9, 2026

27 min episode · 2 min read

Nick Coraciniti

Episode

27 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Leadership, Product & Tech Trends, History

AI-Generated Summary

Published Sep 9, 2026

Key Takeaways

✓Mail voting scale: Approximately 30% of Americans — tens of millions of voters — cast ballots by mail in 2024, with 8 states conducting elections almost entirely through mail. Voters in those states face the highest exposure to disruption if the executive order survives legal challenge, making this far more than a procedural dispute.
✓The compliance trap: The executive order requires states to upload eligible voter lists to a USPS portal before any mail ballots can be sent. States that don't comply receive zero mail ballots. With no portal yet operational and fewer than 60 days before the election, compliance is practically impossible regardless of political willingness.
✓Constitutional boundary: The U.S. Constitution grants the executive branch zero explicit authority over elections — time, place, and manner are reserved for states. Federal district courts and one appeals court have already ruled the executive order unlawful on these grounds, with a Massachusetts judge explicitly underlining the words "does not" in her ruling.
✓Heads-I-win strategy: Even if the Supreme Court strikes down the executive order, the political damage is already done. Voter confusion about mail ballot validity is widespread — Nick Corasaniti reports his inbox shifted from opinion mail to voters simply stating their location and asking whether their ballot will count, signaling deep erosion of confidence.
✓Backup voting options: Local election officials — both Republican and Democrat — are advising voters to use drop boxes or in-person delivery rather than relying on mail return, as a contingency. Voters should verify whether their state permits drop boxes and check local office hours, since some states have restricted drop box availability significantly.

What It Covers

NYT reporter Nick Corasaniti examines Trump's executive order weaponizing the U.S. Postal Service to restrict mail-in voting weeks before midterm elections. Nearly 30% of Americans vote by mail, and 8 states run elections almost entirely that way, making the legal battle before the Supreme Court consequential for tens of millions of voters.

Key Questions Answered

•Mail voting scale: Approximately 30% of Americans — tens of millions of voters — cast ballots by mail in 2024, with 8 states conducting elections almost entirely through mail. Voters in those states face the highest exposure to disruption if the executive order survives legal challenge, making this far more than a procedural dispute.
•The compliance trap: The executive order requires states to upload eligible voter lists to a USPS portal before any mail ballots can be sent. States that don't comply receive zero mail ballots. With no portal yet operational and fewer than 60 days before the election, compliance is practically impossible regardless of political willingness.
•Constitutional boundary: The U.S. Constitution grants the executive branch zero explicit authority over elections — time, place, and manner are reserved for states. Federal district courts and one appeals court have already ruled the executive order unlawful on these grounds, with a Massachusetts judge explicitly underlining the words "does not" in her ruling.
•Heads-I-win strategy: Even if the Supreme Court strikes down the executive order, the political damage is already done. Voter confusion about mail ballot validity is widespread — Nick Corasaniti reports his inbox shifted from opinion mail to voters simply stating their location and asking whether their ballot will count, signaling deep erosion of confidence.
•Backup voting options: Local election officials — both Republican and Democrat — are advising voters to use drop boxes or in-person delivery rather than relying on mail return, as a contingency. Voters should verify whether their state permits drop boxes and check local office hours, since some states have restricted drop box availability significantly.

Notable Moment

A USPS whistleblower revealed to a Democratic congressman that the postal service had been quietly building the voter-list portal throughout the entire legal battle — while states assumed a court injunction had frozen all activity. The portal's construction was also described as technically shoddy, raising additional reliability concerns.

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Episode Transcript

If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Hi. I'm Tabitha Brown. With YouTube Premium, I get ad free videos, offline downloads, and so much more. Try YouTube Premium for two months free. Trial eligibility varies. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. From New York Times, I'm Michael Bilbaro. This is The Daily. On Tuesday, President Trump asked the Supreme Court to bless his audacious plan to restrict voting by mail just weeks before a high stakes midterm election. Today, my colleague, Nick Coraciniti, takes us inside Trump's plan, the legal battle that it's touched off, and the uncertainty that it's created for both local election officials and voters across the country. It's Wednesday, September 9. Nick, thank you for making time for us. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. So looking at the calendar, we are, I believe, just days away in a few states from the official beginning of early voting in this year's midterm elections. And I think rightfully, a lot of our listeners are confused about the state of mail in ballots, which have become a huge way that a lot of the country votes because of the actions that have been taken by the president and how much they become tied up in the courts. So can you just explain the situation that we are in at a very high level? Absolutely. And one thing really quick is that early voting in a way has already begun. On Friday, North Carolina and Delaware started sending out mail ballots. So there are ballots that are on their way to voters as we speak. They're in the system. They're in the system. They're either being processed by the postal service or maybe they already arrived. But where we are in this moment is not to repeatedly use the phrase unprecedented, but something that we've never seen before, which is the president and the executive branch seeking to leverage an agency, in this case, the United States Postal Service, to change how elections are run. And this stems from an executive order that the president signed earlier this year seeking to restrict mail voting and basically turning the postal service into an arbiter of which states can have mail voting. Turning the postal service, which we usually think of as a kind of a neutral player in our election system, literally, the people who carry the votes to the people who need them and then bring them back to the election offices, turning that into an organization that gets to decide if your vote ever counts. Or at least gets to decide whether you can cast your vote. Whether a state can have mail voting at all or whether a voter is able to receive their mail ballot. Turning this agency into this kind of partisan political operator so close to an election. It's just something we haven't seen, especially in the past decade with mail voting becoming so critical to a large part of the American electorate. Just how …

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