Your Ballot Is Not a Box of Human Ashes — Is America Better Yet?

There are sentences in government documents that require several readings because the law is complicated.

And then there are sentences that require several readings because you cannot quite believe the government actually wrote them.

This is one of those sentences.

In defending new federal restrictions on mail ballots, the United States Postal Service reached for examples of other things it regulates specially in the mail.

Its examples?

Cremated human and animal remains.

And replica explosives.

No, that is not satire.

No, a political opponent did not make up the comparison.

It appears in the Postal Service's own final rule governing ballot mail for federal elections.

And behind the absurdity is something considerably more serious.

The federal government is trying to establish a legal principle that could give the Postal Service a gatekeeping role over whether states' mail ballots are accepted into the United States mail.

That is why this bizarre argument matters.

First, what USPS actually said

The Postal Service published its final rule after President Donald Trump directed the agency to impose new requirements on mail voting.

Among other things, the rule would require states to use specified ballot-envelope designs and barcodes and provide information about mailed ballots through a new federal system.

And USPS says that if an outbound ballot mailing does not satisfy its verification requirements, the mailing can be temporarily rejected — meaning the ballots do not enter the mailstream until the problem is corrected.

That creates an obvious legal question.

Where did the Postal Service get the authority to impose conditions capable of stopping a state's ballots from entering the mail?

USPS pointed to its general statutory authority to regulate the mails.

Then it offered precedent.

The Postal Service explained that it already places special conditions on certain unusual things people send through the mail.

For example, cremated human and animal remains must use particular packaging and tracking.

That makes sense. Ashes are irreplaceable. Losing someone's remains in the postal system would be devastating.

USPS also regulates replica or inert explosives.

Those aren't necessarily dangerous either, but imagine what happens when an employee encounters something that looks like a bomb inside the postal system.

So those packages receive special handling.

And then came the leap.

USPS acknowledged that ballots do not present “precisely the same operational issues” as ashes or fake explosives.

But it nevertheless characterized ballots as similarly “sensitive mail” and cited those earlier regulations as support for imposing special conditions on ballot mail.

Read that again.

The argument is not literally that a ballot is a bomb.

It isn't.

The argument is more technical — and more consequential.

USPS is saying:

We can impose special acceptance requirements on cremated remains.

We can impose special acceptance requirements on replica explosives.

Therefore, our general authority over the mail also allows us to impose special acceptance requirements on ballots.

That is the government's argument.

Except a ballot has something ashes and fake bombs don't

A box containing someone's ashes is mail.

A package containing a replica explosive is mail.

A ballot traveling from a state election office to an American voter is also mail.

But it is not only mail.

It is part of an election.

That difference is enormous.

The Constitution specifically assigns authority over the manner of congressional elections initially to the states, subject to Congress's power to alter those rules.

It does not contain a provision giving the President an independent power to rewrite state election procedures.

And it does not say the Postal Service becomes an election regulator simply because a ballot happens to travel inside one of its trucks.

That is the constitutional problem hiding underneath the government's strange examples.

Nobody seriously disputes that USPS can tell customers how much postage something requires, how large a package may be, where an address belongs or how genuinely dangerous material must be shipped.

The question is different:

Can that ordinary postal authority be stretched far enough that USPS can refuse to accept thousands of state-issued ballots because an election office has not complied with a new federal ballot-verification system?

That is what courts are now being asked to decide.

Think about what this means in ordinary life

Imagine your state has legally determined that you qualify to receive a mail ballot.

Your county election office prepares it.

Your name is correct.

Your address is correct.

You are an eligible voter.

Your state says the ballot should be mailed to you.

But under the new federal system, USPS wants additional requirements satisfied before that mailing enters the postal system.

If the state's submission fails verification, USPS says the mailing can be rejected until the problem is fixed.

Nothing about your eligibility to vote necessarily changed.

Nothing about state election law necessarily changed.

The obstacle arose because the federal agency transporting the ballot imposed another condition before accepting it.

That is why describing these merely as rules about envelopes risks missing the real issue.

An envelope rule that can prevent the envelope from being mailed is not inconsequential to the person waiting for what is inside it.

And now DOJ has defended the comparison

The Postal Service's analogy might have disappeared into pages of regulatory language if election attorney Marc Elias had not called attention to it.

But the administration has subsequently defended the underlying reasoning in court.

The Justice Department argued that USPS has previously imposed special handling and acceptance conditions on other sensitive but nondangerous mail, specifically citing cremated remains and replica explosives.

DOJ then made the legal point explicit:

For purposes of the Postal Service's authority, the government argued, there is “no material distinction” between those earlier exercises of postal authority and what USPS is attempting with ballots.

That doesn't mean DOJ believes ballots and human ashes are physically equivalent.

Of course it doesn't.

It means the government believes the same underlying postal power that permits one set of regulations provides authority for the other.

And that is the proposition the courts must examine.

The postage argument has the same problem

The government's broader defense repeatedly tries to characterize these changes as ordinary postal administration.

USPS regulates postage.

It regulates envelope dimensions.

It uses barcodes.

It establishes preparation requirements for bulk mail.

All true.

But none of those facts answers the constitutional question.

The government cannot establish a disputed power merely by comparing it to an undisputed one.

The fact that USPS may reject an ordinary package with insufficient postage does not automatically answer whether USPS may reject a state's batch of election ballots because the state failed a federally created election-mail verification requirement.

One is an ordinary condition governing postal service.

The other potentially determines whether lawfully issued ballots reach American voters before an election.

Calling both “mail regulations” doesn't make that distinction disappear.

This is where the argument becomes almost circular

USPS says ballots deserve special regulation because ballot mail is unusually sensitive.

Why is it sensitive?

Because ballots are critical to elections.

But when challengers argue that these rules therefore interfere with election administration, the government emphasizes that USPS is merely regulating the mail.

So the importance of elections helps justify expanding postal control over ballots.

But the importance of elections supposedly does not transform that expanded control into election administration.

That tension deserves scrutiny.

The government may ultimately persuade a court that Congress gave USPS authority broad enough to do this.

Courts, not IABY, decide that question.

But readers should be able to see the government's reasoning without having it hidden beneath administrative-law terminology.

The stakes aren't theoretical

Millions of Americans vote by mail.

States design their election systems around statutory deadlines.

Election officials order envelopes months in advance.

Military and overseas ballots face federal mailing deadlines.

A regulation capable of stopping an outbound batch of ballots therefore isn't comparable in practical consequence to telling someone which box must contain cremated remains.

If USPS rejects a package of ashes, a shipment is delayed.

If USPS rejects thousands of ballots shortly before an election, thousands of voters can potentially be affected at once.

That doesn't prove they will be disenfranchised.

It explains why the possibility cannot be dismissed as an ordinary packaging dispute.

And there is something even more important than the strange analogy

The rule doesn't exist in isolation.

President Trump issued the executive order that initiated these changes after years of attacking mail voting.

The Postal Service then developed regulations implementing portions of that directive.

The rule creates a Federal Ballot Mail Portal and requires election officials to provide information associated with outbound ballot mail.

And litigation is now determining how much of this system the executive branch can lawfully implement.

Those facts do not prove an unlawful motive.

They do mean we should not pretend this is simply a technical disagreement over where somebody prints a barcode.

It concerns who possesses the power to establish conditions affecting the transmission of ballots in a federal election.

That is a constitutional question.

Sometimes the government's own words tell the story

There is a temptation with an argument this peculiar to ridicule it.

We don't need to.

Put the government's reasoning on the table.

USPS regulates cremated remains because they require extraordinary care.

USPS regulates replica explosives because they can create extraordinary operational problems.

USPS regulates ordinary packages for postage, dimensions and preparation.

And from those powers, the administration argues that USPS possesses sufficient authority to impose new acceptance conditions on state ballot mail.

Maybe a court ultimately accepts that reasoning.

Maybe a court rejects it.

But Americans are entitled to understand what their government is arguing before the answer arrives.

Because your ballot is not a box of ashes.

It isn't a replica bomb.

And it isn't simply another package.

It is the instrument by which you exercise one of the most consequential rights of American citizenship.

Whether the federal government can prevent that instrument from entering the mail because a state failed to satisfy newly created federal requirements is a question considerably larger than postage.

It is a question about who controls an American election.

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I write for you.

— Roberto

Is America Better Yet?

Source note

This article relies principally on the United States Postal Service's final rule, Ballot Mail for Federal Elections, related federal litigation, and reporting by Democracy Docket that drew attention to the cremated-remains and replica-explosives language. Marc Elias's public commentary helped surface the issue. IABY independently reviewed the government's underlying argument rather than relying solely on commentary.

AI disclosure

Artificial intelligence assisted with research organization and drafting. AI output is not evidence. The factual claims in this article were checked against source material.

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