The following is a statement by the USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee. To learn how to join the committee, fill out the form below.
To All USPS Workers,
The Post Office is being turned into a weapon against the right to vote.
Our answer is already given: We will not do it. We refuse to carry out any order to withhold, delay or “verify” mail-in ballots. We will not be the instrument of the disenfranchisement of the American people.
On March 31, Trump signed an executive order that will strip millions of Americans of their mail-in ballots. The Department of Homeland Security is directed to compile federal lists of citizens eligible to vote in each state. Every state must then hand over the names and addresses of all registered voters receiving a mail ballot to the federal government and the USPS. The Postal Service is ordered to “verify” these lists and withhold ballots from any voter not on the federal roster. For states that do not comply, election officials face prosecution by the Department of Justice, and the USPS is directed to refuse to deliver their ballots.
Trump claims mail-in voting has allowed “hundreds of thousands of non‑citizens” to vote. This is a lie. Forty-seven million Americans—30 percent of the electorate—voted by mail in 2024, and the Brookings Institution found just four documented cases of fraud out of 10 million ballots. The real aim is to lay the groundwork for manipulating or even suspending elections that do not go Trump’s way. This is an attempt to rig the 2026 elections.
A whistleblower report by a USPS official concludes that “potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all.” The scheme rests on a chaotic, untested computer portal and a “zero percent failure” rule under which a single mismatched barcode in a batch of 10,000 ballots can cause the Postal Service to refuse the entire batch. As the report put it, the question is whether “catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug”—whether the system is designed to exclude millions of eligible voters and sow chaos.
Why the Post Office is the target
This ballot attack is inseparable from the attack on our jobs. It is part of the same strategy moving to privatize the USPS, through Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) and Postmaster General David Steiner, a former FedEx board member installed by Trump to prepare the Post Office for sale to private profiteers.
The cuts now being planned are the deepest in the history of the post office. Steiner has told Congress that the USPS will shift the workforce toward lower-paid, non-career employees. He has called on Congress to strip away the Universal Service Obligation—the legal requirement to deliver to every address at uniform prices—and to allow the closure of “thousands of unprofitable post offices” and an end to six-day delivery. The Postal Service’s Inspector General has floated a 10 percent workforce reduction, roughly 60,000 jobs, alongside fewer delivery days and the outsourcing of transportation and retail operations. Management has already suspended payments into our pension fund and frozen hiring.
This is the gutting of a public service that was an achievement of the American Revolution. The Post Office was founded under Benjamin Franklin in 1775, and the generation that fought the Revolution regarded the free flow of information as essential to the new republic. Congress subsidized the distribution of news so that the population could take part in political life. The Post Office was never designed to be profitable. It was built to reach every farmhouse and working-class neighborhood, where no private carrier would go. The fight to defend mail-in voting and the fight to defend the post office are the same fight.
As lawyers challenging the order wrote, “USPS is no longer merely a carrier of ballots; it is instead transformed into the gatekeeper of voter eligibility.” Our Post Office is being converted from a public service into an instrument of election rigging and political surveillance.
Why no one else will fight for us
The Democrats will not defend the right to vote. They are a party of Wall Street, more afraid of a working-class movement from below than of fascism. Their response has been a pro forma promise to “fight in court”—while they grovel before Trump and vote to hand him everything he asks. And the courts have been vacillating on the legality of Trump’s executive order. We can’t rely on judges to save us.
Nor will our union officials. The NALC, NRLCA and APWU have not proposed, much less organized, a serious struggle. They tell us to write letters to Congress and respect anti-strike laws. NALC President Brian Renfroe’s answer to privatization is an arbitrated contract cooked up behind closed doors, deprived of the right of the rank and file even to vote on it. The union bureaucracy has worked hand-in-glove with USPS management to introduce the piecework pay, surveillance and speed-up that are bleeding us dry. They are integrated with the state apparatus. They are collaborators, not allies.
What we must do: Build rank-and-file committees
The only force that can stop this is the working class—the most powerful social force on earth. But it can act only if it is organized independently, through rank-and-file committees in every station and distribution center, across all crafts: city and rural carriers, clerks, mail handlers, vehicle operators and technicians.
We must begin now, before the 2026 elections. The committees must:
Refuse to carry out any order to withhold, delay or “verify” mail-in ballots. We refuse it now, and we refuse it together, across all crafts and stations. We will not wait for the courts to decide our answer for us, or for management to issue the first withholding order before we respond. An order that management can impose on one isolated worker can be imposed on all of us; an order that the workforce refuses, collectively and openly, cannot be carried out.
Vigilantly monitor every attempt to put this executive order into practice. We are the ones who will see the withheld ballots, the rejected batches, the new verification procedures. No one is better placed than postal workers to document how this scheme operates and expose it.
Share information across stations, districts and crafts. What happens in one workplace must be known in every workplace. Management will try to carry out the sabotage quietly, station by station. Our answer is to make every act of ballot suppression public.
Coordinate action to oppose it. Link the refusal, the monitoring, and the exposure into a single, unified campaign and build the broadest possible support for it among the public we serve.
We demand:
The defense of universal mail-in voting as a basic democratic right.
A fully funded, fully staffed public post office—no job cuts, no service reductions, no privatization.
An end to the piecework pay and surveillance systems that punish us for doing our jobs.
The independent organization of the working class, in opposition to both corporate-backed parties and their enforcers in the trade union apparatus.
This is a political fight, decided by a struggle between social forces: the working class against the corporate oligarchy that rules through Trump and the Democrats alike. Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and every program on which tens of millions rely are also at stake.
Unite with workers everywhere
We must link up with workers in every city and neighborhood where we make deliveries—federal workers, teachers, industrial workers—to build a unified class movement against dictatorship. Workers in other countries and immigrants in the US are our allies; our real enemies are the oligarchs within the US.
Many rank-and-file committees have already been built at key workplaces and are affiliated in a world movement, the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). Postal workers in Canada, Britain and Germany are fighting similar privatization schemes. We must link up with them and prepare joint actions.
The question is how these demands can be won. They will be won only by the organized, united action of the working class—by strikes, by mass mobilizations, and ultimately by the struggle to replace the dictatorship of capital with a society run in the interests of working people.
If you agree, join us. Contact the USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee today.
In Solidarity,
The USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee