USPS rush to implement Trump order could cause ‘catastrophic failure’ of mail voting, whistleblower claims

A whistleblower claims in a new report that the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) defied a court order by moving forward with a “secretive, rushed” effort to implement President Donald Trump’s mail voting order, which is now mostly blocked.

The report, published Tuesday by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), along with a letter sent by Blumenthal to Postmaster General David Steiner, warns that the hurried development of a data portal for states to upload the new mail ballot envelope designs and mail voter lists required by USPS’s rule carrying out Trump’s order risks disenfranchising millions this November.

“According to the whistleblower, USPS’s effort to develop and deploy the Portal has been ‘rushed,’ ‘risky and haphazard’ because leadership has demanded an impossible timeframe,” Blumenthal wrote. “In an effort to meet impossible deadlines, USPS has eliminated standard and needed testing, thereby creating substantial risk of a ‘catastrophic failure’ of the system that could ‘derail the midterm elections.’”

Blumenthal, the ranking member on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, received the anonymous federal official’s report through Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit legal group. Blumenthal included that report in his letter to Steiner Monday. 

“Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,” the whistleblower wrote to Blumenthal.

The report also accuses the administration of a “pattern of defiance of court orders.”

It notes that USPS continued work on the Portal despite federal injunctions — since lifted — then barring it from doing so. 

On Thursday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order, blocking implementation of the mail voting order — the latest step in the intense legal fight over the directive. Unlike the earlier injunctions, that short-term order allows USPS to continue work on the portal — but, for now, it cannot force states to submit information.

The plaintiffs seeking to block the USPS rule notified the court about the whistleblower report Tuesday morning ahead of a hearing Thursday over issuing a longer-term injunction. No matter the outcome, the results will likely be appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Blumethal’s letter details a slapdash attempt to implement Trump’s order that seems almost designed to leverage minor bureaucratic mistakes into reasons to reject thousands of votes. 

“Not only is this system astonishingly untested, USPS has simultaneously implemented an impracticable zero percent failure rate,” Blumenthal wrote. “When ballots are submitted to USPS in large-volume batches, if any one ballot in the batch cannot be verified against the Portal, all ballots in that batch will be rejected.”

In other words, if there is just one ballot with an issue — like a name that doesn’t match up identically to the name states previously provided to USPS — out of a batch of 10,000, then USPS would refuse to mail all 10,000 of the ballots, not just the flagged one. 

“Voters intending to cast ballots by mail may not even be aware that their ballots have been rejected, or were part of a rejected batch, until it is too late to secure an alternative ballot or vote in person,” Blumenthal added.

And USPS has done all this to attempt to stand up a new proceed, just two months before Election Day, without the normal “basic checks,” like “internal testing, customer acceptance testing, and a final development stage before release to public facing users.”

Federal law requires states to begin sending mail ballots to military and overseas voters 45 days before the election — about three weeks from now. But some states begin mailing ballots before that; North Carolina, for example, begins vote-by-mail on Friday. 

The haphazard sprint to erect a brand new, constitutionally dubious, mail voting process risks undermining the method 47 million Americans, or roughly 30% of the electorate, used to cast their ballots in 2024. That belies the administration’s claim that Trump’s executive order is meant to add security to U.S. elections, Blumenthal noted.

“Put plainly: this process will likely lead to chaos, confusion, and the inability of many Americans to have their vote counted,” he wrote.

This story has been updated.