A whistleblower report by an anonymous United States Postal Service official made public on Tuesday warns that under an executive order issued by President Donald Trump, USPS will withhold mail ballots from millions of voters.
The report, together with a letter to Postmaster General David Steiner, was published Tuesday by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), the top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Blumenthal received the report Monday through Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit legal group.
The whistleblower wrote to Blumenthal: “Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all.”
Trump has stacked the USPS Board of Governors with Republicans who parrot the lie that Biden’s 2020 election victory was the result of fraud. The whistleblower’s report asserts that USPS has rushed to set up a portal for vetting mail ballots in defiance of court orders blocking implementation of Trump’s March 31 executive order curtailing mail-in voting.
The executive order is based on the pretext that mail-in voting has allowed hundreds of thousands of non-citizens to vote, a total fabrication. In 2024, 47 million Americans, or 30 percent of the electorate, voted by mail. Of these, the Brookings Institution found four documented cases of fraud out of 10 million ballots.
The attack on mail-in voting is part of a broader effort to disenfranchise working class and poor voters. The authoritarian drive includes the “Save America Act,” which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and a photo ID to cast a ballot. Trump is also threatening to deploy federal troops and/or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers at polling stations, seize voting machines, and otherwise manipulate, overturn or suspend the November 3 midterm elections, which the Republicans are expected to lose.
The executive order directs the secretary of Homeland Security to compile lists in each state of US citizens 18 and older and eligible to vote, and to send the lists to the states prior to any federal election. The states are then required to send lists of all registered voters to whom they are sending mail-in and absentee ballots to the federal government and USPS. The Postal Service is tasked with verifying these lists and withholding mail ballots from voters not on the lists of citizens compiled by federal agencies.
Finally, the Department of Justice is directed to investigate and prosecute state and local election officials who issue ballots to individuals deemed by the federal government to be ineligible to vote in federal elections. The order also directs the Postal Service to refuse to deliver mail ballots in states that do not comply with the new rules.
The very attempt of the Trump administration to overhaul the election system is unconstitutional. Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution explicitly delegates the manner of holding federal elections to the states, while giving Congress the power to “make or alter regulations” concerning federal elections. The Constitution grants the executive branch no power to administer or regulate federal elections.
Lower courts, including the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, blocked implementation of the executive order on these constitutional grounds. On August 24, the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court reversed one of the two lower court injunctions on technical grounds, without ruling on the legality of the executive order.
Writing in dissent, liberal justice Ketanji Brown Jackson accused the Trump administration of seeking to undermine the midterm elections, stating, “The government’s actual objective: to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections.” At present, a temporary restraining order is in place blocking the order for 14 days, with the expectation that the Supreme Court will rule shortly on its legality.
“USPS is no longer merely a carrier of ballots; it is instead transformed into the gatekeeper of voter eligibility,” lawyers challenging Trump’s executive order wrote in one case.
Speaking of the whistleblower report, Blumenthal told reporters on Monday that “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 whistleblower report describes a chaotic and largely untested drive by USPS to put in place a portal for receiving mail voter lists from the states in time to be used in the midterm elections. The report cites, in the run-up to the planned September 1 launch date, “multiple USPS officials describing the election ballot mail IT system development process as ‘a shit show.’” It adds that “A number of workers familiar with the IT process believed that the entire process seemed to be a ‘mess.’”
The whistleblower focuses on the adoption by USPS of a zero percent failure rule in verifying lists of voters sent by the states to receive mail ballots. He reports:
Given states often deliver ballots to the USPS in large ballot batches, a zero percent failure rate during verification can derail vast numbers of ballots. The new scanning verification process is designed so that after a single failed bar code verification, USPS will stop the sample scanning and refuse to accept the entire batch of ballots.
He adds, “It could delay ballots by the thousands in repeated verification cycles, and thus prevent states from mailing enormous numbers of ballots.”
States constantly update their voter rolls, and the lists they send to the Postal Service could be out of date within minutes as new voters register and existing ones update their registrations because they’ve moved.
Under these conditions, the whistleblower report speaks of “raising questions about whether catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug”—whether, in other words, the entire system is intended to exclude millions of eligible voters and sow chaos.
In his letter to Postmaster General Steiner, Senator Blumenthal wrote:
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.
The non-response of the Democratic Party is typified by the pro-forma statement issued Tuesday by Robert Garcia, congressman from California, who said:
This new secret tracking system at the US Postal Service is faulty, untested, and threatens to totally disrupt ballot delivery for millions of American citizens. We are fighting in court to protect the right to vote by mail for all and will continue to investigate.
The Trump administration’s attack on the right to vote will not be halted by the courts or by appeals to the Democratic Party. Only the mass, independent mobilization of the working class against the entire political and economic system will halt the assault on democratic rights and the drive to dictatorship.