The 30-second message features a variety of voters, among them a busy farmer and a flight attendant, explaining why they cast their ballots by mail. Sponsored by the 200,000-member American Postal Workers Union, the advertising campaign announced Tuesday will begin airing this week in Ohio, where Union Army soldiers during the Civil War cast the first mail ballots in 1864. It will then move to other states.<\/p>\n
The ad ends with the message: \u201cVote by mail \u2014 keep it, protect it, expand it.\u201d It comes two weeks after Trump signed an executive order<\/a> that seeks to create a nationwide list of verified eligible voters and subsequently bar postal workers from sending absentee ballots to those who are not on each state\u2019s approved list.<\/p>\n The order was met swiftly with lawsuits and opposition from postal workers. The National Rural Letter Carriers\u2019 Association said USPS is \u201cnot equipped or authorized to decide who is or is not entitled to vote\u201d and pushing it into such a role \u201crisks politicizing one of the nation\u2019s most trusted public institutions.\u201d The union also said it threatens confidence in the mail and in elections.<\/p>\n Messages were left seeking comment from the White House and the Postal Service.<\/p>\n Jonathan Smith, president of American Postal Workers, said his union\u2019s TV ad was produced before Trump\u2019s executive order was issued, not in response to it. An executive order on elections<\/a> that Trump signed last year also targeted mail ballots by seeking to require they be returned by Election Day, even though more than a dozen states allow a grace period<\/a>.<\/p>\n Smith said the union wants to encourage people to continue voting by mail. But he expressed concern about the potential ramifications of requiring postal workers to determine who should receive an absentee ballot and who should not.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is our position that it is not the job of the postal workers to verify voter eligibility,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is our job to move mail from one destination to the next. He added: \u201cWe do not want to be politicized.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s latest election executive order is already facing lawsuits by various groups, including Democrats in Washington<\/a> who argue that the Constitution empowers states and Congress, not the president, to set election rules.<\/p>\n Trump, who as recently as last month voted by mail<\/a>, has publicly bashed mail voting<\/a> as a source of fraud and is pushing Congress to curtail it through sweeping legislation<\/a>. Mail voting has existed for more than a century and had steadily been increasing in popularity in both Democratic- and Republican-led states until 2020, when Trump started to target the method, levying baseless claims of mass fraud. It has now becomes less popular among Republicans.<\/p>\n A report by the Brookings Institution published in 2025 found that cases of mail voting fraud occurred in only a tiny fraction of total mail ballots cast \u2014 about four cases out of every 10 million mail ballots.<\/p>\n The TV ad is intended to be a direct message to voters, not the president.<\/p>\n \u201cOur message is to America: Vote by mail is efficient, it\u2019s safe, and it\u2019s successful. Period,\u201d Smith said. \u201cThis is educating the American people that you can use vote by mail and you can be guaranteed that your voice will be heard and your vote will be counted.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By SUSAN HAIGH A major U.S. Postal Service union is launching a national TV ad campaign promoting voting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":267502,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[536,28493,116751,74,76,75,25131],"class_list":["post-267501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-donald-trump","tag-mail-in-voting","tag-postal-service-union","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news","tag-vote-by-mail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267501\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Census_Postal_Carriers_77151_ef4fd4.jpg\")
FILE \u2013 The U.S. Postal Service\u2019s next-generation delivery vehicle, left, is displayed as one new battery electric delivery trucks leaves the Kokomo Sorting and Delivery Center in Kokomo, Ind., Aug. 29, 2024. (AP Photo\/Michael Conroy, File)<\/p>\n