An anonymous federal official warned in a whistleblower report released Tuesday that the U.S. Postal Service plans to secretly and unlawfully implement the Trump administration’s mail-in ballot restrictions through a “rushed” new system that could prevent voters from receiving their ballots.
The whistleblower said in a disclosure to Congress that the USPS began working on a new set of untested information technology systems, including the “Federal Ballot Mail Portal,” in June 2026 despite court-ordered injunctions to halt its work, which began following an executive order by President Donald Trump.
The order sought to overhaul the mail-in ballot process by tasking the USPS to compare ballots sent through the mail to a list of eligible voters created by the federal government. The lists would be uploaded to the portal by the states.
The report was released Tuesday morning — the same day states could be expected to start using the system — by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), the ranking member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
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The portal will “almost certainly have significant operating problems” due to rushed development, the whistleblower said. It may lead to failures in the ballot verification process — which under the new system’s “zero percent failure rate” means that if one single ballot’s bar code in a bulk-mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to properly scan, the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the states.
It could result in millions of voters either receiving their ballots late, or not at all, ahead of the November midterm elections, the whistleblower report said.
The Postal Service said in a statement later Tuesday that it is now finalizing the portal and will make it available to election officials who “voluntarily wish to familiarize themselves with the platform.” It will also provide more information about “whether and how they wish to use it.”
“The portal is just one part of a broader, year-round effort by the Postal Service to ensure that election mail and ballots are handled and delivered securely, reliably, and efficiently,” a Postal Service spokesperson said in a statement. “USPS regularly works with election officials, mail service providers, and the broader mailing community to provide guidance on election-mail procedures, operational standards, and best practices.”
The statement did not address the allegations that the process was rushed or about zero-percent failures. The Postal Service said it would comply with court orders and that the district judge’s ruling allows it to continue working on the portal.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
“We are crossing the Rubicon of American elections,” said Libby Liu, the chief executive officer of Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit legal organization that is representing the whistleblower. “This dangerously defective mail-in ballot process could disenfranchise millions of voters, ensnaring ballots in red tape under the guise of solving a non-existent problem. The whistleblower’s service to our nation is warning the public that their ability to vote is in serious jeopardy.”
The unnamed whistleblower said that the USPS’s fast-track timeline skips over standard steps and violates “standard principles of testing and debugging new software before launch.” A project of this complexity and magnitude should take between nine months to a year to complete, if not more, they added.
The new system will have gone through less than a week of testing before Tuesday’s deadline, “well short of best practice,” the report said. It added that multiple USPS officials have described the rushed development process as “a shit show.”
When a team member expressed concern about the lack of testing and quality of the code, a senior USPS official told them, “We cannot fail,” according to the report.
“Without any offer of additional information or guidance, the official went on to say words to the effect that ‘everything had to work perfectly and there was no other choice,’” the report said.
The system, according to the whistleblower, employs a rarely used “zero percent failure rate” that suggests even one mismatched record could imperil thousands of other ballots in the same batch. The draconian new standards, combined with the new zero tolerance policy, could easily “derail” this year’s midterms, they said.
“As designed, the process is entirely unforgiving,” the report reads. “It could delay ballots by the thousands in repeated verification cycles — and thus prevent states from mailing enormous numbers of ballots.”
Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which has jurisdiction over the Postal Service, said the new tracking system threatens to disrupt ballot delivery for millions of Americans.
“This is an unconstitutional and dangerous power grab and must be permanently and immediately blocked,” Garcia said in a statement. “We are fighting in the courts to protect the right to vote. We will have more to come on this serious and illegal attack on our vote by mail system.”
This story has been updated with statements from Rep. Robert Garcia and the Postal Service.
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