A new U.S. Postal Service computer system being developed to carry out President Donald Trump’s executive order on mail voting was built on an extraordinarily compressed timetable and could contain serious flaws capable of disrupting ballot delivery for millions of Americans, according to whistleblower allegations released Tuesday by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.
The Postal Service initiative stems from Trump’s executive order imposing new requirements on mail voting. Implementation has become the subject of an ongoing court battle, with a federal judge temporarily blocking the new procedures and the administration appealing the decision. The dispute could ultimately return to the Supreme Court.
According to the unidentified whistleblower, USPS employees have been racing to create in roughly three months a complicated computer system that would ordinarily require at least a year to develop. The disclosure also alleges that some work continued despite court orders temporarily stopping implementation. Officials have been working toward having the system available for the midterm elections.
Among the concerns outlined in the disclosure is the possibility that a single scanning problem involving one ballot envelope could result in an entire batch containing tens of thousands of ballots being held back from voters. Election administrators have already warned that the procedures cannot realistically be put into operation before North Carolina begins sending its first mail ballots on Friday.
“The Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans,” Blumenthal told reporters in advance of releasing the whistleblower information. “This administration seems hell-bent on changing the framework on casting ballots in this country clearly for political reasons.”
Trump signed the executive order in March, directing U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Social Security Administration commissioner to create state citizenship lists. The order subsequently requires the Postal Service to mail ballots only to voters whose names appear on such a list.
The new procedures would also require ballot envelopes to meet additional USPS specifications, including the use of barcodes.
At the center of the whistleblower allegations is an online portal designed to allow states to provide the Postal Service with lists of voters whose eligibility has been verified.
The Postal Service did not provide a comment Monday night, while the White House had not immediately responded Tuesday to a request for comment.
The White House has defended the mail-voting provisions as “commonsense measures” aimed at preventing election fraud.
Trump has been a longtime critic of widespread mail voting, although he has himself cast ballots through the mail. He has pointed to mail voting in connection with his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. A 2025 Brookings Institution report estimated that fraud involving mail ballots occurred at a rate of roughly four cases for every 10 million such ballots cast.
Since returning to the White House, Trump has argued that Republicans should be “taking over” the counting of ballots in Democratic-leaning jurisdictions and has initiated a broad effort to reexamine the 2020 election against Joe Biden.
Mail voting had previously been used at roughly comparable levels by voters from both major political parties before Trump began strongly opposing the practice in 2020. Democratic voters have since become more likely to use it. In the 2024 election, more than 29% of voters nationwide cast their ballots by mail.
Following Trump’s executive order, Democratic officials and civil rights organizations filed suit. They eventually secured a decision from U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston preventing implementation of the new system ahead of the November midterm elections.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority, however, ruled last week — without deciding whether Trump’s executive order itself was lawful — that Talwani’s action had been premature and overturned her decision, temporarily allowing implementation to move forward.
On Aug. 21, the Postal Service published its final regulations detailing how the agency intended to carry out Trump’s directive.
Under those regulations, USPS would process mail ballots only for states that received approval for their ballot-envelope designs and provided lists of the affected voters through the online portal, which was not yet active. The issuance of the final rule opened the door to another legal challenge, and Talwani responded Thursday night by imposing a 14-day restraining order blocking its implementation.
A letter from Blumenthal, together with a summary of the whistleblower allegations, states that USPS initially began developing the portal on June 15 before stopping work June 25 following Talwani’s first court order.
Development resumed on July 29, according to the disclosure, at the same time the administration was appealing Talwani’s ruling to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court did not overturn her injunction until Aug. 24.
Talwani determined last week that USPS had violated her order by continuing its work on the final regulation, although she declined to sanction the government over the violation.
On Monday, Talwani refused to withdraw her latest restraining order. She nevertheless ruled that USPS could continue developing the online portal provided states were not required to use the system.
Whistleblower Aid, which summarized the whistleblower’s account, said the effort to have the portal operational by Tuesday resulted in the system being developed without comprehensive testing.
“The apparently sloppy and rushed manner in which the Federal Ballot Mail Portal and supporting IT systems are being built poses significant risk,” the group wrote. “Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all.”
The whistleblower disclosure further alleges that USPS plans to employ a “zero percent” rule under which an error involving even one mail ballot submitted by an election office could cause the entire batch to be rejected and returned for correction, regardless of whether tens of thousands of other ballots in the shipment are legitimate.
Under the proposed process, an election official would have to bring the ballots physically to a post office, where they would be scanned and compared with the voter database. The disclosure says the ballots would undergo three separate levels of verification, with even a single apparent discrepancy potentially resulting in rejection of the complete batch.
Blumenthal said he has “a very strong hope and some faith that our system of justice will strike down this unconstitutional and unconscionable rule.” He added that if the new procedures nevertheless take effect for the midterm elections, he would advise voters against casting their ballots by mail.
{Matzav.com}
