A whistleblower has warned that the U.S. Postal Service’s new system for handling mail ballots has potentially catastrophic problems, even as the agency keeps working on the rollout of a rule a federal judge has temporarily blocked. The disclosure, made public on Tuesday, says the Postal Service is pressing ahead with a system tied to a Trump executive order before the November midterm elections.
Richard Blumenthal, the Democratic senator from Connecticut who received the disclosure, is now questioning Postmaster General David Steiner about the new online portal the Postal Service is building. Blumenthal said, “The main takeaway for me is that the Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans.”
The issue matters because the Postal Service rule would change how mail ballots move through the system. It sets new design standards for outbound and return ballot envelopes, requires a unique barcode on those envelopes and sends state election officials into a Federal Ballot Mail Portal to submit voters’ names, addresses and barcode information. Once that information is entered, those voters would be considered enrolled with the Postal Service on their state’s Mail-In and Absentee Participation List.
The Postal Service says it will not play any role in determining voter eligibility, maintaining voter rolls or counting ballots. But that promise is exactly where the fight hardens. Blumenthal said, “One third of all Americans cast their ballots by mail, and the USPS puts all of their votes at risk.” The whistleblower’s warning points to a system still being built while the rule itself is under court review and the Justice Department has already appealed the decision blocking it.
The clash sits inside a broader push by Donald Trump for tighter federal control over mail voting. In March, Trump signed an executive order after saying “the cheating on mail-in voting is legendary” and that new rules were needed to “ensure the integrity of federal elections.” A March CBS News poll found 77% of Democrats, 25% of Republicans and 49% of independents backed allowing anyone to vote by mail.
That divide is what gives the whistleblower disclosure its force now. Six states conduct their elections entirely by mail, and four states and the District of Columbia send ballots to all voters without ending in-person voting, so a Postal Service system that mishandles ballot data would not be a niche problem. It would ripple through millions of votes already moving through a method Americans use in large numbers, and the next test will be whether the court fight stops the rollout before the portal becomes part of election administration.
