Whistleblower warns USPS mail ballot portal could disrupt midterms

A whistleblower is warning that a new U.S. Postal Service system for screening mail ballots under President Donald Trump’s election order is rushed, untested and could disrupt the coming midterm elections if courts allow it to take effect.

The anonymous federal official, represented by the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid, made the allegations in a disclosure provided to Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. Blumenthal sent the complaint Monday to Postmaster General David Steiner, asking for information about the Postal Service’s development of an online portal tied to Trump’s March executive order on mail voting.

The order directed the administration to create federal lists of citizens and called on the Postal Service to transmit mail ballots only to those people. The USPS normally transports ballots between election officials and voters; it has not previously operated a central system to vet absentee voters. Key parts of the plan are blocked for now by a federal court order while litigation continues over the order’s legality.

The whistleblower said the Postal Service began building the portal “in earnest” only in June, leaving less than three months to complete work that would ordinarily take nine to 12 months. The disclosure described the development process as “rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed,” and said workers feared the system would crash. According to the complaint, workers involved in the project described it days before its planned Sept. 1 public launch as a “s— show.”

“USPS leadership, it appears, has discarded all best practices as they speed the project to be ready for a September 1 implementation — raising questions about whether catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug,” the disclosure said, according to NPR.

Under the Postal Service rule finalized last month, state election officials would have to submit voters’ names, addresses and unique ballot envelope barcodes to an online “Federal Ballot Mail Portal.” Those voters would then be enrolled on a state “Mail-In and Absentee Participation List.” The rule also imposes design standards for outgoing and return ballot envelopes, including unique barcodes.

The whistleblower focused on what the disclosure called a “zero percent failure” verification policy. CBS News reported that postal workers would scan a sample of a ballot mailing — about 400 ballots from a batch of 10,000 or more — to check it against the federal portal. If one barcode failed to scan properly, the entire batch would be rejected and sent back to state officials.

“As presently designed, if even one bar code on one single ballot in a bulk-mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to properly scan during the verification process, the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the state — effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed to voters,” the complaint said.

The whistleblower’s lawyers said the process is “entirely unforgiving” and “could delay ballots by the thousands in repeated verification cycles — and thus prevent states from mailing enormous numbers of ballots.”

Blumenthal sharply criticized the plan. “The main takeaway for me is that the Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans,” he told reporters, according to CBS News. He also said the administration appeared “hell-bent on changing the framework of casting ballots in this country, clearly for political reasons.”

Trump has defended his directives as a way to curb illegal voting by non-U.S. citizens. NPR noted that studies and audits show such voting is extremely rare. CBS News reported that Trump said in March that “the cheating on mail-in voting is legendary,” but that his administration has not produced evidence of widespread voter fraud. Trump has voted by mail himself.

A federal judge in Boston last week issued a temporary restraining order against the Postal Service after finding its plan was likely illegal because the agency lacks authority to control mail voting, NPR reported. The Trump administration has appealed to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. CBS News reported that the Supreme Court separately lifted an earlier lower court order in a case brought by 23 Democratic-led states, saying the lawsuit was premature while noting that its decision “does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful.”

The whistleblower also alleged that the Postal Service continued work on the portal despite court orders blocking implementation. The USPS and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment from NBC News; NPR also said USPS did not immediately respond to questions.