A whistleblower has told the U.S. Senate that the United States Postal Service is rushing to build an untested online system to screen mail-in ballots — a system so slapdash that a single mismatched barcode could trigger the rejection of tens of thousands of votes at once, potentially disenfranchising millions of Americans in the November midterm elections.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, made the whistleblower’s disclosure public Tuesday in a letter to Postmaster General David Steiner.
The senator is demanding documents and answers about what he called the Postal Service’s “seemingly illegal plot to interfere” in the elections.
“This brave whistleblower has come forward with disturbing details,” Blumenthal told reporters. “Their system is set up to fail — and risk the right to vote for millions of Americans who cast their ballots by mail. Given this new information, such sloppiness and haste seems clearly part of a purposeful attempt to create chaos and prevent people from voting.”
The whistleblower, represented by the nonprofit legal group Whistleblower Aid, warned that “potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all.”
At the heart of the crisis is what Postal Service officials call “the Portal” — a new online system that will, for the first time in American history, transform the mail carrier into a gatekeeper of voter eligibility.
Under an executive order issued by President Trump on March 31, the Postal Service is tasked with verifying lists of registered voters against federal citizenship databases. If a state’s list doesn’t match, the Postal Service can refuse to deliver the ballots.
The order is based on the Trump administration’s repeated, unsubstantiated claim that mail-in voting has allowed “hundreds of thousands” of noncitizens to vote. The Brookings Institution found four documented cases of fraud out of 10 million mail ballots cast in 2024.
But the whistleblower’s report describes a system being built not with care, but with haste bordering on recklessness.
Work on the Portal began on or around June 15 — just three and a half months before the planned Sept. 1 launch date and only five months before the November election. A federal court enjoined implementation of the executive order on June 25, ordering work to stop. According to the whistleblower, however, the project was “suddenly resumed” around July 29 “without explanation of what authority permitted USPS to ignore the court order.”
When the Supreme Court lifted one of the injunctions on Aug. 24, and another was lifted two days later, the Postal Service was already months behind. The teams building the Portal were “siloed,” the whistleblower said, with little communication between them. There were “no clear written requirements,” forcing workers to “glean requirements from opaque comments at meetings.”
As late as Aug. 21, workers were still receiving new requirements. Multiple USPS officials described the development process as “a shit show.”
The system has not undergone meaningful testing, the whistleblower said. It “violates standard principles of testing and debugging new software before launch.”
And then there is the zero-percent failure rule.
If a state election official brings a batch of 10,000 ballots to the Postal Service and the barcode scanner fails to read even one of them — because, say, a voter recently changed their name after marriage or moved — the entire batch is rejected and returned to the state.
All 10,000 ballots. Returned. With no clear process for appeal.
“USPS expects the state to take back the entire batch to cure the issue with the single ballot,” the whistleblower wrote.
Blumenthal put it plainly in his letter to the postmaster general: “For example, if a state election official brings a batch of 10,000 ballots to USPS and USPS is unable to match just one of those ballots against the Portal — because, for example, someone has recently changed their name after marriage or they’ve moved — then USPS would refuse to mail the remaining 9,999 ballots as well.”
States constantly update their voter rolls. A list that is accurate at 9 a.m. can be out of date by 9:15. The whistleblower raised the question that haunts this entire affair: whether “catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug.”
The Postal Service’s new final rule, issued Aug. 26, marks a “marked and deeply troubling departure” from its traditional role, Blumenthal wrote. Historically, USPS issued guidance on ballot envelopes. It did not decide which ballots got mailed and which did not.
Now it does.
The executive order directing all this is almost certainly unconstitutional. Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution gives states the authority to set the “Times, Places and Manner” of federal elections. The executive branch has no power to regulate them. Lower courts, including the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, blocked the order on those grounds.
On Aug. 24, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority reversed one injunction on technical grounds without ruling on the order’s legality. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in dissent, accused the administration of seeking “to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections.” A temporary restraining order is now in place for 14 days, blocking the Postal Service from doing any work on the Portal while the Supreme Court considers the case.
“The crown jewel of American democracy — our historic record of free and fair elections — deserves better than this reckless, slapdash effort,” said David Kligerman, senior vice president and special counsel at Whistleblower Aid. “Given this administration’s record on curtailing voting rights, these glaring issues in the ballot mail program raise a troubling question: are these bugs — or features?”
The Postal Service has been given until Sept. 4 to answer Blumenthal’s questions and until Sept. 8 to produce records. The senator is asking, among other things, whether USPS has complied with the current court order, who ordered the work to resume and what legal opinions justified continuing development while courts had enjoined it.
Forty-seven million Americans — 30% of the electorate — voted by mail in 2024. They are the ones who will pay the price if this system fails.
Blumenthal was blunt: “The main takeaway for me is that the Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans. One-third of all Americans cast their ballots by mail, and the USPS puts all of their votes at risk.”
The rest of us are left to wonder whether the chaos is the consequence of incompetence — or the point of the exercise.
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