Anyone who has been paying the slightest bit of attention for the last year of Trump/GOP attempts to dismantle voting by mail–despite the fact that Trump himself votes exclusively by mail–should already have been expecting mail ballots to turn into a giant quagmire this November. Seriously, if you actually need to be told this directly, I’ll just say it: Don’t plan on voting by mail this year if you want to be sure your vote is counted. Vote in person, as early as you are possibly allowed to do so. Don’t take it from me, either–take it from the United States Postal Service (USPS) whistleblower who today laid out a startling, in-depth whistleblower report detailing what he described as a “secretive, rushed” effort within the organization to implement Donald Trump’s executive order limiting mail voting, despite the fact that court orders have currently instructed the USPS to halt any activity of that nature.
The Postal Service, according to the whistleblower report published by the office of Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal (CT), has simply kept humming merrily along with its last-minute effort to apply the commands of that executive order. This has been thrown together in such “risky and haphazard” fashion, though, according to the USPS employee, that he warns it could lead to “catastrophic failure” of the entire mail ballot handling system during November’s midterm elections, thanks to a brand new and untested digital system overseeing mail ballots that USPS reportedly intends to complete this month.
“Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,” said the anonymous Postal Service whistleblower in the report. Commenting on the report, Blumenthal added that “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.” The USPS, meanwhile, declined to offer any comment on the report as of Tuesday morning.
On the left:
USPS Whistleblower disclosure: USPS preparatory work on mail-in ballot Rule continued after court order prohibiting it.
On the right:
Court order: USPS Defendants “may take no further preparatory steps.”
(disclosure via @blumenthal.senate.gov public release)
— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw.bsky.social) 8:52 AM · Sep 1, 2026
It is hard to overstate just how deeply Trump’s executive order, if put into practice, could upend the entire midterm elections. It would be especially pervasive in its potential impact in some of the most key swing states where control of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate would be decided.
Michigan, for instance, cast a whopping 37% of all its votes by mail in 2022, during the last midterm elections, and is the site of several important, competitive races this year. Whether or not the USPS is allowed to proceed in implementing the commands of the executive order, meanwhile, have been tied up in stop-and-go rulings by various judges and courts. Massachusetts Federal District Court Judge Indira Talwani originally gave the plan a temporary block, which was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals, which reasoned that the order “would sow confusion and threaten disenfranchisement of many eligible voters” by being implemented so close to the election.
The Trump-friendly U.S. Supreme Court then intervened, saying that the lawsuit challenging the executive order had been effectively filed too early before the administration and USPS had begun concrete actions to implement the plan, without specifically ruling on whether the plan itself would be legal. Following the Postal Service then formally publishing a plan to comply, more lawsuits were filed, and Judge Talwani issued a ruling blocking it all over again last week, arguing that the USPS has now demonstrated it is attempting to take action. More details of this action are contained within the whistleblower report, including allegations that work continued ceaselessly on the digital mail ballot system even after the court orders to halt any progress.
In the report, the whistleblower official goes on to say that the verification process of the system is of particular concern, noting that it could potentially reject entire bulk-mailing batches of ballots (10,000 or more at once) if “even one bar code on one single ballot” scanned improperly. The official blames the “slapdash” rush to develop a system that Donald Trump previously crowed would hand the midterm election to Republican candidates … by preventing “fraud,” of course.
As always at this moment, it is important to note that the Trump administration is attempting to respond to a purely imaginary threat of widespread voter fraud that has never been successfully identified to actually exist anywhere in the United States. Numerous studies and reviews have all concluded that actual voter fraud is practically nonexistent, with a 2025 report from the Brooking Institution finding that fraud in mail voting occurred roughly 0.000043% of the time. That’s roughly 4 “fraudulent” votes per 10 million votes cast by mail in the United States, and even then, most of the singular cases come down to accidental user error of some kind.
According to the whistleblower, USPS is moving forward anyway. A court said stop. They apparently heard, “keep going, just don’t tell anyone.”
— Alt National Park Service (@altnps.bsky.social) 11:01 AM · Sep 1, 2026
Trump’s executive order, meanwhile, attempts to have the federal government, largely via the Department of Homeland Security, seize control of many aspects of mail voting, creating “state citizenship lists” compiled from citizenship, naturalization, and Social Security records, to assemble what is essentially a national voter list. Said list would then be sent to state election officials, who would be prosecuted by the federal government if they refuse to use the list in determining the eligibility of any given voter.
Simultaneously, the order commands the U.S. Postal Service to similarly check against the list and refuse to deliver mail-in or absentee ballots to or from any individual who is not on the “state citizenship list.” This, despite the fact that the executive branch also has no formal power over the USPS, and cannot legally tell it what mail to deliver and not to deliver. Trump, as ever, relies on intimidation to get his way, and has previously floated the idea of reorganizing USPS to bring it under direct control by folding it into the Commerce Department.
There are countless potential problems in implementing such a plan. As we previously described:
It should probably go without saying that even if the federal government was able to implement this kind of national voter database, it would be immediately rife with problems–no doubt something the administration fully intends. Because each state’s voter rolls are updated on a daily basis via people moving in and out of the state, naturalizing, registering to vote, turning 18 or dying, the state-level lists are constantly in flux. A federal database created by simply taking a snapshot of that data would be out of date more or less instantaneously, while also allowing the federal government myriad opportunities to disenfranchise any individual voter or groups or voters they want by simply leaving them off the list without explanation. The Justice Department has been trying for months to access unredacted voter rolls from all 50 states, but only a handful of deep red states have acquiesced to date.
This is all material that Trump wanted delivered to him by a Republican-controlled Congress in the form of the SAVE Act, but a sizeable number of GOP members of Congress who actually want to hold onto their seats have wanted no part in attaching their own responsibility to the plan, leading to Trump’s patently illegal executive orders instead. The only question now is: If USPS simply ignores the rulings of judges, up to a potential future ruling from the Supreme Court, who is going to safeguard mail voting in the United States?
Regardless, the fact remains: Vote early, and vote in person, in 2026. The Postal Service has already demonstrated it cannot be trusted to safeguard the rights of voters.
