Klaus Marre 09/01/26 (WhoWhatWhy.org)
An explosive whistleblower report alleges that the Trump administration is cutting corners and violated a temporary restraining order in an effort to implement a verification system for mail-in ballots that is virtually assured to create chaos ahead of the midterms and may disenfranchise millions of American voters.
A federal whistleblower is alleging that the administration ignored a temporary restraining order that prevented it from proceeding with its scheme to prevent eligible Americans from voting by mail, and that the United States Postal Service (USPS) is rushing to complete a shoddy and untested verification system that could result in the disenfranchisement of millions of voters by denying them the right to cast their ballot by mail.
According to Whistleblower Aid, a legal organization that helps whistleblowers in the public and private sectors expose governmental and corporate wrongdoing, the individual who came forward has “direct knowledge of potentially catastrophic problems” related to this system, and acted to “flag a foreseeable catastrophic disruption to our coming nationwide elections based on the reckless pursuit of readying a new, insufficiently tested, poorly planned mail-in ballot screening system.”
The group approached Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), the ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, with the whistleblower’s account on Sunday.
It is included in a letter that the lawmaker sent to Postmaster General David Steiner on Tuesday morning to get answers to questions about the ballot verification system and whether USPS ignored a judge’s order barring the postal service from working on it.
According to the whistleblower, the administration’s plan is to put it in place as early as today, but doing so would have disastrous consequences.
“The apparently sloppy and rushed manner in which the Federal Ballot Mail Portal and supporting IT systems are being built poses significant risk,” the whistleblower report states. “Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all.”
One of the main problems with the way the system is designed, according to the whistleblower, is that it features a “zero percent failure rate” with regard to reading the unique barcodes on envelopes containing the ballots sent to voters as well as the completed ballots they are sending back.
“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 whistleblower report states.
The problems with such a system, even one that wasn’t rushed and haphazardly designed, should be apparent to anybody who has ever tried to use a self-checkout to buy their groceries.
Of course, in light of Donald Trump’s war on mail-in ballots, potentially preventing tens of millions of Americans from voting by mail may be a feature of the new system and not a bug.
While the whistleblower alleges that the system is to be completed as early as today, it is unclear how USPS could roll it out without being in blatant violation of a temporary restraining order that prevents the administration from implementing a final rule governing how it plans to handle ballots ahead of the midterm election in November.
In his letter, Blumenthal is asking Steiner to reconsider.
“Despite [the problems the whistleblower detailed], the Trump Administration appears intent on USPS moving forward with its flawed plans, no matter the chaos they may create,” Blumenthal wrote. “We urge you to abandon this ill-conceived, unconscionable plan and ensure that all Americans can exercise their constitutional right to vote, including by mail, without interference by USPS.”
However, it seems virtually unthinkable that the Trump administration would put an end to a scheme that is central to any hopes Republicans have to keep control of Congress.
The president, obsessed with his loss to Joe Biden in 2020, has long blamed mail-in ballots for a defeat he fails to acknowledge to this day by falsely claiming that the election was “stolen” from him and that millions of ballots were fraudulently cast.
Again, there is zero evidence that any of that happened, but election denialism and false allegations of “voter fraud” have become canon in the GOP.
In light of Trump’s dismal approval ratings, it is extremely likely that Democrats will win at least one chamber of Congress and exert the kind of oversight that Republicans have refused to exercise.
For example, when it comes to USPS’s efforts to unconstitutionally give the federal government a say in how the states administer elections.
- Klaus MarreKlaus Marre, a former congressional reporter, is a senior editor for US politics at WhoWhatWhy. He writes regularly here, and you can also follow him on Bluesky and Substack.