A guy named David Steiner runs the post office now, and he told the Senate today that he wants the power to stop your ballot from showing up.

Not because the ballot is fake. Not because you did anything wrong. Just because your state wouldn't hand the Trump administration a list of everyone voting by mail.

Steiner is the Postmaster General. That's the person in charge of mail in this country. Trump signed an order back in March telling the post office to lean on states for these lists, and the post office wrote up a rule to make it happen. Senator Gary Peters asked Steiner straight up: if a state won't turn over its list of mail voters, will you still deliver their ballots? Steiner said, "Under our proposed regulation, no."

So that's where we are. The man who runs the mail just said he'll hold ballots hostage until states cough up voter data to the feds.

I had to read three different write-ups to be sure I wasn't missing something, because it sounded too dumb to be real. It's real. The post office wants states to send Washington a "manifest" of who's voting by mail, and any state that says no gets cut off. The list isn't even your basic registration roll. It's a list of the specific people who asked for a mail ballot. Your name, on a sheet, going to the same administration that's already suing states to grab voter files.

Peters called it a back-door way for the federal government to get information the states are supposed to control. He's right. The Constitution hands elections to the states, not to whoever's sitting in the White House. Steiner's own post office said last year that it does not run elections and does not make the rules. Now he's sitting in a hearing saying he'll decide whose ballot moves.

Here's the part that should bother everybody, no matter who you vote for. Mail voting is how a lot of seniors vote. It's how a lot of disabled folks vote. It's how military families overseas vote. None of that has anything to do with fraud, because the fraud doesn't exist. Election officials from both parties have said that for years.

If this rule sticks and blue states refuse to play along, you end up with mail voting in red states and nowhere else, right before the midterms that decide who runs Congress. Steiner says it's just about matching ballots and being efficient. A guy who can't keep the post office out of bankruptcy is going to lecture us about efficiency while he sets up a national list of mail voters.

Forty-seven Democratic senators signed a letter calling it illegal. Courts are already hearing the lawsuits. Steiner says he'll back off if a judge makes him. He needs a judge to make him deliver your ballot.

#ratcclips