A whistleblower has warned that a new U.S. Postal Service computer system, built in haste to implement President Donald Trump's executive order on mail voting, could prevent millions of American voters from receiving their ballots in this election cycle. The disclosure, released by Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal, contends that a single scanning error in a batch of tens of thousands of ballot envelopes could block all of them from reaching voters.
The system is part of the administration's broader effort to restrict mail voting, a practice used by more than 29% of all voters in the 2024 election. The executive order, signed in March, requires the Postal Service to send mail ballots only to voters appearing on state citizenship lists, with ballot envelopes needing to comply with new rules and include bar codes. The online portal at the centre of the complaint is intended for states to submit their lists of verified voters to the Postal Service.
Blumenthal told reporters that the Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans, accusing the administration of changing the framework for casting ballots for political reasons. The whistleblower statement says the portal, which would normally take a year or more to build, was constructed in roughly three months, sometimes in defiance of a federal judge's orders halting the work. The goal was to have it ready for the midterm elections, with the first mail ballots set to go out Friday in North Carolina.
The legal battle over the executive order has been intense. U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani in Boston initially barred implementation of the system before the November midterms. The Supreme Court's conservative majority later found that ruling premature and cleared the way for implementation, but Talwani issued a 14-day restraining order against the measure on Thursday night after the Postal Service released its final rule. On Monday, she refused to lift the restraining order, though she allowed the Postal Service to continue work on its portal as long as it was not forcing states to use it.
The whistleblower's account, summarised by the group Whistleblower Aid, says the portal's hurried construction meant it did not undergo full testing. The Postal Service began work on the portal on June 15 and stopped on June 25 after Talwani's initial order, then restarted on July 29 when the administration appealed to the Supreme Court. The high court did not strike down the injunction until Aug. 24. Talwani last week found the Postal Service violated her order by continuing to work on the final rule but imposed no sanctions.
The White House has called the mail voting provisions commonsense measures necessary to combat fraud, but a 2025 Brookings Institution report found that mail voting fraud occurred in only about four cases out of every 10 million mail ballots cast. Trump has long opposed voting by mail, despite using the method himself, and has falsely blamed it for his 2020 election loss. Until 2020, mail voting was used equally by both parties, but it has since become more common among Democratic voters.