Trump administration is ‘hiding’ efforts to implement anti-mail voting order, Democrats tell court

Democrats are accusing the Trump administration of concealing from a federal judge its efforts to implement key parts of President Donald Trump’s anti-mail voting executive order before November’s midterm elections.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), Democratic National Committee, Democratic Governors Association, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries* filed a new motion on Wednesday asking a federal district court in Washington, D.C., to order the administration to disclose the status of its work.

The filing comes after a whistleblower told Congress that the U.S. Postal Service has been rushing to advance Trump’s demands in defiance of court orders. As a result, the anonymous federal official revealed, new software systems for screening mail ballots are flawed and risk disenfranchising millions of voters.

“In short, Defendants are hiding the nature and timing of their implementation of the challenged provisions, and this defiance of the Court’s expected transparency is prejudicial to Democratic Party Plaintiffs’ ability to prosecute their case and obtain timely relief,” the Democrats wrote.

They said it’s become “increasingly apparent that Defendants have been withholding material facts about implementation, leaving Democratic Party Plaintiffs to rely on glimpses of information that makes its way into the public sphere, discovering them through news reports, or Google searches, and now through an anonymous whistleblower, in order to obtain key information about what Defendants are doing.”

It’s not just USPS that has taken notable steps without informing the court, Democrats said.

Another major component of Trump’s March executive order directed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Social Security Administration (SSA) to build a national registry of citizens who are eligible to vote – raising the alarm of voting rights and privacy experts.

The last update on the registry came two-and-a-half months ago, Democrats said, and since then the administration has “repeatedly refused to share information about decisions regarding it.”

But then this week, DHS published a new webpage dubbed the “State Citizenship Lists Portal.” The page claimed the lists were “coming soon.” The site was suddenly taken down after Democracy Docket reported on it.

Democrats said their counsel found the site “only by happenstance through a Google search on the night of August 31, 2026. As of the afternoon of September 1, that page displayed a ‘Coming Soon’ banner, but it has since been taken down.”

The coalition of Democratic organizations were joined in Wednesday’s filing by the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), two civil rights groups who are also challenging the president’s anti-mail voting order in court.

*The Elias Law Group (ELG) represents the plaintiffs in this case. ELG Firm Chair Marc Elias is the founder of Democracy Docket.