A Mailer Asking You to Vote by Mail, and an Executive Order Trying to Stop It

How the Alaska GOP's absentee mailer and Trump's mail-voting order pull in opposite directions

This summer, an Alaska household got a familiar piece of mail: a pre-filled absentee ballot application from Alaska Republicans, Inc., urging them to request their primary ballot before the August 8th deadline. It's the same kind of outreach the party has run every statewide election since 1994. What's changed is the backdrop it landed in — a presidential administration actively trying to make mail voting harder to access, through a mechanism that could eventually make mailers just like this one far less useful.

The mailer, briefly

The piece itself is unremarkable on its face: a party return address, a real state absentee ballot application enclosed, and a nudge to vote before a busy day silences your voice in the primary. Unlike a similar 2020 mailing that scrambled thousands of names and addresses in a printing error, this one appears correctly addressed. It works exactly as intended — request the form, mail it in, and the state sends you an actual ballot.

The executive order aimed at the other end of that process

In March 2026, President Trump signed an executive order targeting mail-in voting nationally. Its core mechanism puts the U.S. Postal Service in charge of deciding whose ballots get delivered at all: the order directs USPS to refuse to transmit any mail-in or absentee ballot for a voter who isn't enrolled on a new, state-specific approved list. It also has the Department of Homeland Security compiling its own lists of voting-age citizens, and threatens criminal penalties for anyone involved in producing or delivering ballots to people the administration considers ineligible.

Where this collides with a mailer like Alaska's

Here's the connection: the party's mailer is only useful if the resulting ballot actually reaches the voter and gets delivered back. Under the executive order's USPS mechanism, that delivery becomes conditional on the state having already submitted the voter's information to a federal list. A mailer that successfully gets someone to apply would, in that scenario, still run into a second checkpoint entirely outside the party's or the voter's control — whether the state complied with a separate federal list requirement for that specific voter.

In other words: the mailer solves the "request a ballot" problem. The executive order, if it took effect, would insert a brand new "will the Postal Service actually carry it" problem right behind it — one the party sending the mailer has no ability to fix.

Why that scenario isn't happening right now

As of this writing, none of this is actually operating. A federal judge blocked the Postal Service from carrying out the plan nationwide in early July 2026, ruling it violated a settlement from an earlier lawsuit — on top of an already-standing block covering roughly two dozen states that had separately sued. So the mailer and the order aren't currently in tension in practice; they're just aimed at fundamentally different visions of how easy mail voting should be, with one of them presently unable to take effect.

The underlying irony

Step back, and there's a real tension worth naming, separate from any question of intent: the same political coalition pushing hardest to restrict and tightly verify mail voting is also the one actively encouraging people to use it, in the here and now, through a process that hasn't yet closed the gaps that motivate the restriction. That's not necessarily contradictory — a party can mobilize turnout under today's rules while sincerely believing those rules need tightening. But it does mean the mailer in your mailbox and the executive order in the courts are, right now, working at cross purposes.

Sources:
CNN, "Postal Service won't deliver mail ballots for states that don't hand over voter lists" (June 10, 2026)
CNN, "US Postal Service cannot carry out Trump order on mail ballot delivery, judge rules" (July 1, 2026)
Brennan Center for Justice, "Analyzing the President's Executive Order on Mail Voting"
Votebeat, "USPS mail ballot proposal could add new hurdles for voters and election officials" (May 29, 2026)
KRBD, "Alaska Republican Party sends thousands of absentee voting applications to incorrect addresses" (July 23, 2020)