AG Blanche defends tighter mail voting rules as DOJ probes election practices

Attorney General Todd Blanche sat down with CBS News to defend the Trump administration's new mail voting rules just weeks before the midterm elections, arguing that the Justice Department had identified widespread problems in how states conduct elections. When pressed for concrete evidence that tighter mail voting restrictions would actually prevent fraud, Blanche's answer shifted. He began by saying there was "a lot of evidence," then pivoted to asserting that mail-in voting inherently carries greater fraud risk than in-person voting with identification. Asked directly what that evidence was, he settled on a simpler formulation: common sense.

The rules in question, adopted on August 21st, require states to provide the Postal Service with lists of mail ballot recipients and mandate that ballots be sent in USPS-approved envelopes carrying unique barcodes. Under the new regulation, the Postal Service could refuse to transmit ballots that don't meet those specifications. The administration framed this as a necessary safeguard. But the courts have disagreed. A federal judge in Massachusetts issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Postal Service from enforcing the rules, and a second federal judge blocked the policy on Sunday. On Monday evening, the Supreme Court declined to lift the Massachusetts injunction, leaving the new restrictions blocked for the upcoming midterms. The litigation will continue, but for now, the rules cannot be enforced.

The gap between the administration's claims and what research actually shows is substantial. A 2024 Stanford study examined roughly 4.5 million voters in Washington state and found only 14 ballots that might have been suspiciously cast after a voter's death—about 0.0003 percent of the total. Even those cases could have involved matching or clerical errors. A broader analysis covering the 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections found roughly four identified cases of mail-ballot fraud for every 10 million mail ballots cast, an average rate of 0.000043 percent. Documented election fraud, including mail-ballot fraud, does occur, but researchers have consistently found it to be rare.

Beyond the mail voting rules, the Justice Department has been pursuing a broader examination of election practices. The department has told 29 states and Washington D.C. to preserve 2024 election records and is now suing for voter-registration data containing sensitive identifiers. The DOJ has also acknowledged in litigation that unredacted voter data is being shared with the Department of Homeland Security for citizenship checks. When Blanche was asked about these efforts to obtain voter-registration data, he said the department has "hundreds of open investigations into people who are here illegally and who potentially, and in many cases, they've been charged with voting."

He elaborated: "We have hundreds of ongoing investigations where we have identified people who are here illegally or are otherwise not eligible to vote, that have voted. We have some of them who have been charged. Some of those investigations are ongoing." When asked whether information collected from states would be placed into a database, Blanche said he was "not aware of a database," but acknowledged that the information being collected would have to be stored and used by federal agencies. "We're not going to just do it and leave it in an office and say, you know, so be it," he said. "We would use it to help us understand whether there's people here voting who shouldn't be voting."

The scope of the DOJ's data collection and the hundreds of investigations Blanche referenced raise questions about how voter information will be handled, stored, and shared across federal agencies—questions that remain largely unanswered. The administration's push for tighter election rules and broader access to voter data continues even as courts block the specific mail voting restrictions, setting up a sustained legal and political battle over how elections are conducted and who gets to decide.