A U.S. Postal Service official has filed a whistleblower report alleging that the agency is moving forward with a “secretive, rushed” effort to implement President Trump’s executive order exerting federal control over mail voting, despite a court order blocking those plans.
The report, released by Senator Richard Blumenthal’s office, warns that the “risky and haphazard” implementation could lead to a “catastrophic failure” in the mail ballot system ahead of this year’s midterm elections. It states that the agency had planned to complete a new digital system overseeing mail ballots by Sept. 1.
“Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,” the official said in the report, which was prepared with assistance from Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit that represents individuals seeking to expose potential lawbreaking.
Senator Blumenthal said of the report, “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 U.S.P.S. puts all of their votes at risk.”
A Postal Service official declined to comment on the record.
Voting by mail will become much more difficult, if not impossible, for tens of millions of Americans if the Postal Service is allowed to implement the restrictive rules governing mail voting that Mr. Trump has demanded.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly promoted false claims of widespread fraud through mail‑in voting, which he has described as “cheating,” “corrupt” and “horrible,” even though he voted by mail in two elections this year. He has moved to restrict mail‑in voting using a variety of procedural and legislative levers.
Those moves have led to a cascade of legal rulings and challenges surrounding the nation’s electoral system just two months before the midterm elections. The rules could especially affect states where some of the most competitive races for House, Senate and governor will determine control of Congress and state governments.
Michigan, where 37 percent of votes were cast by mail in 2022, would be one such state, with competitive statewide contests and multiple battleground House races. California, which mails ballots to all voters, is expected to be central to Democratic efforts to win control in the House.
The Supreme Court had allowed the Trump administration to move ahead with Mr. Trump’s mail ballot executive order, reasoning that a lawsuit challenging the order was premature because the administration had not yet begun implementing its plans.
But days before that ruling, the Postal Service formally published a new plan to comply with the executive order. Judge Indira Talwani, a Federal District Court judge in Massachusetts, concluded that the stakes had changed with the new plan and temporarily blocked it, saying the agency’s plan appeared to overstep its legal mandate and could spark chaos by changing rules a little more than two months before an election.
The whistleblower report provided specific details of the Postal Service’s effort to rapidly implement a new digital system for mail ballots, even as a federal appeals court had blocked the plan before the Supreme Court intervened. Work has also continued on the system even after Judge Talwani ordered the plan halted last week, the report said.
The official raised “grave concerns” that the verification process in the system could reject tens of thousands of ballots in a bulk‑mailing batch if “even one bar code on one single ballot” failed to scan properly, and that the rushed, “slapdash” development would significantly increase the chance of errors and other failures in the verification process.
Reid J. Epstein and Nick Corasaniti contributed reporting.