A whistleblower inside the United States Postal Service has warned that a hastily built federal system designed to oversee mail-in ballots could prevent millions of Americans from receiving their ballots in time for November's midterm elections — or at all. The disclosure, released Tuesday by Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, describes the project as "secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed," and says insufficient testing could lead to "catastrophic failure" in the handling of election mail.
The new system stems from an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in March, which seeks to impose tighter federal controls on mail-in voting by requiring states to submit verified voter rolls to a federal online portal. Under the proposed rules, postal workers would scan barcodes on outgoing ballot envelopes and check them against a federal database before accepting batches for delivery. The whistleblower — an anonymous USPS official represented by the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid — alleges the agency adopted a "zero percent failure" policy under which a single scanning error in a batch of tens of thousands of ballot envelopes could result in the entire batch being rejected until the discrepancy is resolved. The portal, which analysts note would normally take a year or more to build and test properly, was assembled in roughly three months. The agency had targeted a September 1 launch date.
The case has become the subject of fierce legal dispute. A federal judge in Boston, U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani, initially blocked key parts of Trump's order, finding the Postal Service likely lacked the authority to regulate who may receive a mail ballot. The Supreme Court's conservative majority subsequently overruled that injunction, temporarily clearing the way for implementation — but Talwani issued a fresh 14-day restraining order last week after the Postal Service published its final implementation rule. The administration is appealing, and the case may return to the Supreme Court. USPS denied defying court orders, saying work on the portal had been lawful and that its use would initially be voluntary for election officials.
Critics argue the system raises deep constitutional concerns. The U.S. Constitution vests control over election procedures — time, place, and manner — with state governments, and analysts say the new rules would effectively make the Postal Service a federal clearinghouse for ballots in an unprecedented way. Mail voting, which was once used equally across party lines, has become more common among Democratic voters since Trump began opposing it in 2020. Roughly one-third of all voters — nearly 50 million people — cast their ballots by mail in the 2024 general election. Trump himself has voted by mail multiple times.
The stakes are particularly acute because several states, including North Carolina, were preparing to send mail ballots out as early as Friday, leaving election officials little time to adapt. Blumenthal urged Postmaster General David Steiner to abandon the plan entirely, warning that the Postal Service lacked the technical and operational capacity to implement it safely. "If it somehow goes into effect for the midterms," Blumenthal said, he would not advise voters to cast their ballots by mail. A Brookings Institution report published in 2025 found that mail voting fraud occurred in only about four cases out of every 10 million ballots cast — undermining the administration's central justification for the overhaul.