How the Postal Service Became Central to U.S. Elections The mail system took on new prominence during the Civil War by enabling soldiers to vote from afar. On Monday, the Supreme Court blocked President Trump’s effort to give it a new role in elections. Two U.S. service members talked over their absentee ballots outside a bunker in Korea in 1952.

Days before the election of 1864, Pvt. Isaac Walters watched a group of soldiers leave a Union hospital in Virginia. They had been granted furloughs to travel hundreds of miles home to vote.

Walters wished he could join them. “They will all get to vote for President I Suppose,” he wrote his sister-in-law, in a letter preserved at the National Postal Museum in Washington, D. C. More than 160 years later, voting from afar is again at the center of a fight over American democracy.

The Supreme Court on Monday blocked the Trump administration’s plan to use the Postal Service to screen mail ballots, the latest chapter in the long and sometimes contentious relationship between the nation’s postal system and its elections. The postal system was created in part to bring together and inform citizens of a sprawling republic. It later helped Americans away from home cast their ballots, weathered a transformation in its funding and a collapse in traditional mail, and became a political flashpoint when voting by mail peaked during the coronavirus pandemic.

The postal system was born in revolution. Before the American Revolution, colonists built an alternative to the British mail system that connected groups and allowed them to communicate beyond the reach of Crown postmasters, according to the National Postal Museum. In 1775, the Continental Congress adopted the idea and named Benjamin Franklin the first postmaster general.

The Post Office Act of 1792 reflected the founders’ belief that the mail system could help sustain the new republic. George Washington championed a broad postal network to spread knowledge of the government’s laws and proceedings. James Madison warned against high postage rates that would inhibit the “distribution of knowledge and information throughout the Union.” Congress made newspapers especially cheap to mail, helping to support an informed electorate.

The law also protected the privacy of correspondence and gave Congress control over new postal routes. Postal Service records show that the network grew with the country, from 75 post offices in 1790 to more than 28,000 by 1860. The idea of using it to facilitate voting away from home was emerging: Pennsylvania allowed soldiers to cast absentee ballots from the field during the War of 1812, and New Jersey passed similar legislation in 1815.

The Civil War changed how Americans voted. Absentee voting was not entirely new, but it became widespread during the Civil War and turned into a partisan issue. As President Abraham Lincoln sought re-election in 1864, hundreds of thousands of voters were on battlefields far from home.

Nineteen Union states allowed troops to vote away from their usual polling places via field polling places, proxies and mail, according to the Library of Congress. The changes prompted accusations of fraud and intimidation, including absentee ballot-stuffing and Lincoln administration officials pressuring soldiers, according to Jonathan W. White, a Civil War historian.

The balloting processes varied. In Ohio, soldiers voted in camps and hospitals, and election officials mailed the tallies home in specially printed envelopes. Other states used the mail to carry ballots or proxy votes.

The Civil War established an enduring precedent: Americans unable to reach the polls did not have to forfeit their votes.