A whistleblower has revealed that the U.S. Postal Service is secretly rushing through a “fundamentally flawed” new IT system that could disenfranchise millions of voters in the midterm elections, in violation of multiple court orders.
The USPS began developing the system in June in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to limit voting by mail, according to a whistleblower report published by Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.
The president for years has spread baseless claims that voting by mail is a form of “cheating” plagued by widespread fraud, despite court records and independent audits finding voter fraud to be extremely rare—and despite Trump himself repeatedly casting absentee ballots.
The March executive order requires the USPS to regulate and approve absentee-ballot design, oversee a federal database of absentee voters, and assign individual barcodes to ballots, even though the Constitution explicitly gives states the power to administer elections.
Work on the new IT system was paused for about a month after the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the USPS from implementing Trump’s executive order, according to the whistleblower, who was identified only as a USPS official.
But development resumed about a month ago while the court order was still in effect, resulting in a “slapdash software development process” as the USPS attempted to create a complex IT system in a matter of weeks, the whistleblower report warned.
For example, the way the system is designed, if even one barcode on one ballot in a bulk mailing of 10,000 ballots failed 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.
“Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,” the report said.
Normally, a project of this magnitude would take a year or more, but USPS leadership “discarded all best practices”—including standard testing—as they rushed to prepare the system for a Sept. 1 launch date ahead of the midterm elections in November, the whistleblower alleged.
That carelessness raises the question of whether “catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug,” the report added.
Blumenthal told reporters on Monday that one-third of Americans cast their ballots by mail, and the USPS “puts all of their votes at risk,” The New York Times reported.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the USPS for comment.
The president has tried to control who can cast mail-in ballots using a patchwork of procedural and legislative mechanisms, leading to a dizzying array of legal rulings and challenges just weeks before states are scheduled to begin sending out ballots.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority voted last week to allow the USPS to move ahead with a new rule implementing the president’s executive order, saying that previous legal challenges were premature because the rule was still in the proposal stage.
The decision did not address the proposed rule’s lawfulness.
Days later, the USPS issued its final rule, and a federal judge blocked it on the grounds that the Supreme Court’s reasoning no longer applied.
In her ruling, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani noted that the Constitution explicitly gives states the power to administer elections while granting Congress an oversight role. Congress has not adopted any legislation that would allow the USPS to regulate election mail, she wrote.
In a statement to the Daily Beast, a White House spokesperson called Talwani, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, an “activist judge,” and vowed to appeal the ruling.
The administration’s efforts to limit mail-in voting come as White House insiders have expressed alarm about Republicans’ chances in November, given Trump’s record-low approval ratings and widespread voter dissatisfaction with the war in Iran and the cost-of-living crisis.
