Mail-in voters weigh flying to vote in person and other backup plans amid uncertainty

Postal Service to cast her ballots as a voter registered in Texas but stationed out of state with her husband, an active-duty service member. This year, though, to make sure her voice is heard, she's making a backup plan. Kiper hopes she'll be able to exercise her voting rights by mail for this year's midterm general election.

But she recently started considering spending around $2,000 to book flights and rental cars so she can vote in person. "It's not something that I think a lot of us in the military are prepared to spend because many military families operate on a single income," Kiper said. "For me, I think that it's important to prioritize the rights that our active-duty members are serving to preserve." The ongoing legal fight over a Postal Service plan for President Trump's attempt to exert control over federal elections is forcing millions of other eligible voters to navigate the uncertainty with voting by mail for the midterms.

For now, USPS is expected to handle election mail as usual. North Carolina and parts of Wisconsin have already started sending out absentee ballots for the general election. District Judge Indira Talwani has blocked USPS from refusing to deliver ballots to voters in states where election officials do not turn over voter lists to the mailing agency and do not have certain specific barcodes on their ballot envelopes.

But the Trump administration has asked the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court to allow those new federal mail ballot requirements for the midterms. Rulings from those courts may come as soon as this week.

They could unleash a major upheaval to voting by mail, which was how about 1 in 3 voters cast ballots in the last two federal elections. In her latest ruling against the USPS plan, Judge Talwani warned that other states gearing up to mail out their ballots later this month are "unable to pivot this late in the election cycle, nearly guaranteeing significant disenfranchisement for eligible voters." The Postal Service has defended its revised mail ballot rule as "modest data and mail preparation requirements." USPS has also highlighted what it considers the rule's "visibility and law-enforcement benefits," echoing Trump's use of illegal voting by non-U.S. citizens — an incredibly rare problem — to justify the executive order that prompted the USPS plan. But Talwani, a nominee of former President Barack Obama, concluded that the plan is a likely illegal effort by a mailing agency that has no authority to control voting by mail.

In both of her rulings against USPS, the judge noted Trump administration lawyers have provided no evidence of mail-voting fraud to support a rush to carry out new ballot requirements for this year's midterms. Instead, election officials around the country have offered one sworn statement after another about possible massive disruptions to voting. "It would be virtually impossible for Wisconsin to comply," Don Millis, the Republican-appointed chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said in a sworn declaration supporting the lawsuit that two dozen mainly Democratic-led states, plus Washington, D.C., brought against the USPS plan.