The U.S. Postal Service has been openly defying a court order in an attempt to throw the midterms into electoral chaos. That’s according to a new whistleblower complaint, made public on Tuesday by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT). The complaint alleges USPS kept building the technical system underlying Trump’s mail-voting restrictions even after a federal judge ordered the work stopped.
The Postal Service also lied about what it was up to. On July 15, Postmaster General David Steiner and USPS Board of Governors Chairwoman Amber McReynolds wrote to Senate Democrats declaring, “The Postal Service is abiding by these injunctions, which are also currently under appeal.” USPS leadership continued to claim publicly and to Congress that the agency was not moving forward with the rule, even as work on the portal resumed two weeks later.
The whistleblower complaint also contains a worrisome warning: The system, as designed, could reject entire batches of mail ballots over a single scanning error. That gives USPS a mechanism for disenfranchisement at scale. Attorney Marc Elias of Democracy Docket noted that a batching rule that groups ballots by ZIP code would disproportionately affect Democratic-leaning, higher-density areas. And as Sen. Blumenthal pointed out, voters who recently changed their names after marriage or moved are among those most likely to trigger a mismatch—the same populations targeted by the SAVE Act.
“It may be sloppy. It may be chaotic,” Elias observed. “But it is designed to achieve what Trump wants.”
The legal landscape, CliffsNotes version
As I wrote about earlier, the backdrop to the whistleblower complaint is a pitched legal battle over a March executive order. It sought to aggressively restrict mail balloting by directing USPS to withhold delivery of ballots from any state that refuses to submit its voter rolls to the federal government. To comply with the order, USPS hastily built the “Federal Ballot Mail Portal” and list-matching system now at the center of the whistleblower’s account.
The legal fight reached the Supreme Court on Aug. 24. As I explained in my piece shortly after that ruling, the radical conservative majority, abusing the emergency docket once again, cleared a narrow procedural path forward. It ruled that the original lawsuit was not “ripe” because there was no formal rule in place, the plaintiffs had not yet suffered actual harm and therefore the court lacked jurisdiction to issue its injunction. That twisted procedural holding left the underlying legality of Trump’s order, as well as the USPS implementing rule, open to challenge.
Bowing to the SCOTUS ruling, Judge Indira Talwani lifted her block on Aug. 26. But by the end of that day, a coalition representing 24 states, Washington, D.C., and voting-rights groups filed a fresh challenge to the now-finalized rule. Judge Talwani responded the next day with a new 14-day restraining order blocking the rule’s mandatory provisions. It expires Sept. 10.
Defying the court and lying to Congress
According to the whistleblower’s timeline, USPS began building the Federal Ballot Mail Portal on June 15. The agency halted that work on June 25, the day Talwani first ruled Trump’s executive order legally void. It then resumed construction on July 29, the same day the White House appealed Talwani’s order to the Supreme Court.
But hold up. Just because you appeal a ruling to SCOTUS doesn’t mean you can start disobeying it. It’s simply on appeal, so you’re still bound by the order unless and until a higher court overturns it.
USPS didn’t care. The complaint describes the restart of work on the system as a mystery: work was “suddenly resumed without explanation of what authority permitted U.S.P.S. to ignore the court order.”
Note the sequence of events. The last of the injunctions covering USPS’s work “was not lifted until Aug. 26, 2026, after weeks of work were done on the new election ballot mail IT system,” the complaint states. Yet work continued at “a breakneck speed” while the injunctions were in place, in defiance of the court’s order.
USPS disputes that its actions amounted to defiance. The agency confirmed it continued work on the portal during the legal fight, but it claims it remained in compliance because it was not yet using the parts of the system that could invalidate anyone’s vote.
Nice try, but no. That’s like saying you were complying with a ban on nuclear weapons while you continued to purify weapons-grade uranium and build missile systems to deliver the warheads. “We haven’t used the nukes yet” isn’t the standard.
And Judge Talwani’s order wasn’t the only one the government ignored. In a parallel D.C. lawsuit, a federal judge had ordered the Justice Department to notify the court of any “material factual developments while this litigation remains pending.” The DOJ did not inform that court when USPS resumed work in late July despite another court’s injunction. That seems pretty material.
Talwani had already found in her Aug. 25 ruling that USPS violated her injunction. She wrote, “[D]espite the Defendants’ protestations that ‘[t]he United States takes its obligation to comply with court orders very seriously,’ the court finds that Defendants violated the preliminary injunction in this case.”
But the extent of the violation was not fully known until the whistleblower’s complaint became public. Blumenthal characterized the overall pattern as intentional and issued a stark warning. “This is not just incompetence, it is ‘designed malfunction,’” he told reporters.
A system built to fail one ballot at a time
The system USPS built (while telling Congress it wasn’t building anything) relies on a multi-step verification process, designed to produce mass rejections of ballots.
States must first upload a “Mail-In and Absentee Participation List” of every voter set to receive a ballot. A batch manifest for each mailing is then checked against that list, and anything short of a 100 percent match sends the whole manifest back to the state.
Ballots that clear the manifest check face a second hurdle. USPS clerks sample barcodes from each batch at the point of mailing: 15 codes for batches under 1,000 ballots, 350 for batches between 1,000 and 10,000, and 400 for anything larger. The complaint states what happens next: “As presently designed, if even one barcode on one single ballot in a bulk-mailing of 10,000 ballots fails 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.”
A White House spokesperson downplayed concerns about the barcode system, saying it was “neither complex nor unique for USPS since the Postal Service regularly uses bulk mailing and intelligent mail barcodes for a wide variety of large customers.”
USPS did not disclose this zero-failure threshold to the public during the comment period before finalizing its rule. The agency’s final rule expressly declined to provide an anticipated ballot-rejection rate, leaving election officials and voters unable to gauge the consequences of the system the agency was actively building, even while denying it was doing so.
That omission is hard to read as an oversight, particularly given USPS’s own operational history. A 2017 audit of package tracking by the USPS Office of Inspector General documented technical problems with USPS scanners, including delayed transmissions and signal obstruction. The agency’s own “zero-failure design” for mail-in ballots leaves no room for those kinds of known scanning problems, particularly given batches running into the tens of thousands of ballots.
Then there is the rushed development schedule. USPS set a three-month timeline for a project the whistleblower says should ordinarily take 9 to 12 months or longer. The portal also skipped standard software testing. In the final days before its planned Sept. 1 launch, multiple USPS officials described the development process to the whistleblower as “a shit show.”
Democracy activists and lawmakers respond
Sen. Blumenthal, ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, released the whistleblower’s disclosure alongside a letter to Postmaster General Steiner. He described the findings as “alarming” and declared they “present a clear picture of a fatally flawed process that cannot and will not protect American voters.” He gave Steiner until Sept. 8 to respond, requesting records and communications about the system’s development, including whether work continued during periods USPS told Congress it had stopped. He also referred the matter to USPS’s Inspector General.
On a call with reporters, Blumenthal was even more blunt about the stakes. “The main takeaway for me is that the Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans,” he said.
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA), ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, framed the disclosure as a deliberate power grab rather than mere mismanagement. “Trump is creating a new tracking system at the US Postal Service that is untested, dangerous, and threatens to totally disrupt ballot delivery for millions of American citizens,” Garcia said in a statement. “This is an unconstitutional and dangerous power grab and must be permanently and immediately blocked.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, whose state is among the plaintiffs and relies heavily on mail-in ballots, vowed to fight on. “From the beginning, it’s been clear that President Trump doesn’t understand how elections work. He’s repeatedly broken the law, so we’ve repeatedly taken him to court.” Gov. Gavin Newsom upped the ante considerably. “Defying court orders to engage in election interference should bring prison time,” Newsom said. “Lock them up. Defend democracy.”
Where things stand
Judge Talwani reaffirmed her restraining order on Monday, rejecting a White House request to lift it to allow USPS to move forward with its portal so long as it doesn’t force states to use it. That’s the same improper loophole the agency had already squeezed through once, according to the whistleblower’s account.
The Justice Department is taking the fight up the judicial ladder. It’s asked the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to treat Talwani’s temporary order as an appealable injunction and to stay it, arguing her 14-day window has the “practical effect” of a preliminary injunction even though it isn’t labeled one. The appeals court’s response will determine whether Talwani’s order holds through Sept. 10.
That timeline matters. States are already preparing to send out mail-in ballots for the midterms. North Carolina ballots are scheduled to begin mailing Sept. 4, and Alabama’s follow on Sept. 9. So the legal fight is about to collide with the real world, including whether USPS actually starts using the system once ballots begin moving.
With all these shenanigans from the federal government, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) was clearly fed up and gave voters some blunt advice at a press conference Tuesday morning. “Just go fucking vote. The Trump administration is going to try to suppress your vote.”
The judge should install an oversight council over the postal service, a new acting director through the end of the year and require weekly reports as to the status of mail in ballot process to ensure free and fair elections.
Could the states use an alternative to the USPS to get the ballots to voters? UPS or Fedex or online portal?