Howdy folks.

The Supreme Court finally brought some clarity to the legal fight over voting by mail this November and election officials are now in full prep mode. Here’s a look at what’s in this edition:

Election officials played a key role in Supreme Court fight
Will FBI agents be in your polling place on Election Day?
DHS provides Pennsylvania with new details on noncitizen voters

Votebeat's reporters watch and report on vote counting and other key election processes. Help keep them in the room by donating today.

Support Votebeat

Election officials exhaled when the Supreme Court on Monday night ended months of uncertainty by blocking the Trump administration from restricting mail ballots this November.

The Supreme Court decision clears the way for millions of Americans to vote by mail, just as they have in previous elections, though availability ranges widely from state to state.

“It's a relief and it's palpable,” said Marybeth Kuznik, the elections director for Pennsylvania’s Fayette County. “I honestly don't know how we could have complied with [the Postal Service’s restrictions] at this point in the election cycle.”

But the administration’s efforts to tighten access and the chaotic legal battle that ensued left voters worrying that voting by mail could be disrupted or unreliable.

Now election officials are working to reassure them.

For months, people across the political spectrum voiced concerns about the new proposed U.S. Postal Service rules pushed by President Donald Trump. Election officials from both major political parties played a central role in the Supreme Court debate. More than 80 of them, including Kuznik, signed onto a brief warning that they wouldn’t have time to meet the new requirements before the November election.

Several Republican secretaries of state, including officials from Kentucky, Georgia, and Kansas, urged the court to freeze the plans because of the chaos they would create for an election now less than 50 days away.

Those pleas appear to have been decisive for at least one justice, Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote a concurring opinion saying he thought there was a fair chance the rules would hold up to legal scrutiny, but applying them in the 2026 elections would be “arbitrary and capricious” because “state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule.”

Now, election officials who have been for months raising concerns about an entirely new vote by mail system have to communicate to voters that the old one is safe to use, even as Trump continues to denounce it. Despite voting by mail himself last month in Florida, Trump attacked the process on social media as a “disaster” and “Nation Destroying SCAM” that made America the “laughing stock all over the World.”

Some election officials and experts said they are seeing fewer absentee ballot requests than expected.

“It has already caused all sorts of voter confusion, and even though the rule is not in place for this election, that's not to say that there won't be some voters that think that it is,” said Tammy Patrick, the chief program officer at the Election Center, a national nonprofit association for election administrators. “So it’s going to be incumbent on all of us to make sure that we just keep up the mantra that nothing has changed as a result of the rule.”

Patrick, who filed an expert declaration in the court cases challenging the Postal Service rules, said the best thing voters can do is get their ballots in as early as possible.

Dana Lewis, the recorder who oversees elections in Arizona’s Pinal County, joked that she wears six-inch heels so she can pivot on a dime, something that gave her the dexterity to keep up with this topsy-turvy election season.

Lewis, a Republican, has invested heavily in her county’s drop box system, which includes 24/7 video monitoring and GPS-locked ballot boxes for tighter security, something she believes should give voters confidence that their ballots will be kept safe. Roughly three-quarters of Arizona’s voters cast mail ballots in 2024, federal data show.

“Trust the system,” Lewis said.

But not everyone does. The court ruling came in parallel with a new poll showing a precipitous decline in public confidence in the nation’s electoral system. The University of California, San Diego survey found that just 55% of respondents trust that the vote would be counted fairly, compared to 71% in 2024.

The poll also found just 49% of Americans expect the upcoming election to be free and fair.

That’s in line with other polling, including a recent Pew Research Center survey in which 55% of respondents said they thought the upcoming election would be free and fair, an historic low for the question they have asked over the past six years.

Votebeat Brunch: Will the FBI be in your polling place?

FBI Director Kash Patel testified before Congress last week, and his comments reignited speculation that he might send agents into polling places this November. This week, Votebeat spoke with Chris O’Leary, a longtime senior FBI counterterrorism official who now works as senior vice president for global operations at consulting firm The Soufan Group, about what the FBI can — and can’t — do during the election.

What is the FBI’s traditional role around elections?

So the FBI's role in the past has been to look at foreign corruption. So having things like the foreign influence task force, which was established back in 2020, to monitor these things and synchronize the efforts of the U.S. government to counter such activity. In the modern era, our cyber units are making sure that there's no cyber attacks against our electoral systems. The FBI is monitoring and mitigating those threats as they come up.

At the hearing, Patel mentioned that the FBI would have “election crimes community coordinators” in all 56 field offices. In the past, the FBI had a National Election Command Post to coordinate around elections. What are we talking about?

[The effort is] intended to monitor anything popping up in a field office. It’s not putting agents on the street. It is serving as a liaison function between the states’ attorneys general and the election coordinators and those field offices. It also was synchronized with the Foreign Influence Task Force. These are the kinds of things that people were concerned about. Are the Russians, are the Chinese, are others, trying to subvert the election? So they had the architecture in place to assess and, if necessary, deploy FBI resources. It was a listening post.

Is it fair and accurate to say that FBI agents shouldn't be allowed to enter a polling place on election day without a warrant?

One hundred percent they should not. There's a law against it. There's also traditionally a Department of Justice prohibition against doing such things.

How worried are you that the FBI might be asked to execute a warrant to seize ballots or voting machines this year?

I am genuinely concerned that this is actually going to come to fruition, and that my teammates from the FBI are going to be attempted to be used in an inappropriate way against the citizens of the United States. And they're going to be put in an impossible situation.

How are the Media and Social Media Doing in Informing Voters?

How are the Media and Social Media Doing in Informing Voters? Votebeat Editor-in-Chief Carrie Levine will discuss that this Tuesday, Sept. 22, in a webinar hosted by UCLA’s Safeguarding Democracy project. Moderated by Rick Hasen, the panel also includes NPR’s David Folkenflik, David Kaye, a UC Irvine law professor and former United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, and Shannon McGregor, a University of North Carolina professor and expert on political communication and social media. Register here.