A whistleblower has raised serious concerns about the U.S. Postal Service's newly implemented system for mail-in voting, claiming it is deeply flawed, untested, and could lead to the rejection of thousands of legitimate ballots. The system, developed in response to a March executive order from former President Trump, requires ballots to include unique barcodes and for election officials to submit voter and ballot-envelope information through a new online "Federal Ballot Mail Portal." Senator Richard Blumenthal, who received the whistleblower complaint, has asked Postmaster General David Steiner for answers, alleging an "illegal plot to interfere in November’s midterms" and that the system is "set up to fail."
The whistleblower, identified as an anonymous federal official represented by Whistleblower Aid, asserts that the USPS began building the portal "in earnest" only in June, leaving less than three months for a system that would typically require nine to twelve months. This rushed timeline has resulted in a "chaotic, and fundamentally flawed process." Critics, including Senator Blumenthal and Representative Robert Garcia, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, describe the system as "untested, dangerous, and threatens to totally disrupt ballot delivery for millions of American citizens."
A key point of contention is the alleged "zero percent failure rate" policy. The whistleblower claims that if even one barcode on a single ballot in a bulk mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to scan or match during verification, the entire batch would be rejected and returned to state election officials, effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed. While the published USPS rule does not explicitly detail this "zero-error threshold" or specific sampling numbers, the potential for such a policy, combined with a compressed timeline for training election workers, presents significant risks. More than 29% of all voters in 2024 cast their ballots through the mail, a method that has become more prevalent among Democratic voters since 2020.
