An anonymous federal official warned in a disclosure to Congress that a rushed and insufficiently tested U.S. Postal Service system could prevent large numbers of Americans from receiving mail ballots this fall if courts approve President Donald Trump’s plans for the midterm elections.
The disclosure, made public Tuesday morning by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.), says the Postal Service has adopted an internal “zero-percent failure policy” under which an entire batch of ballots would be rejected if a single barcode sampled by a postal employee could not be scanned or matched with information submitted through a new online portal. A batch could contain tens of thousands of ballots, according to the disclosure.
“The Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans,” Blumenthal said in a call with reporters.
Postal officials and the White House did not immediately provide comment.
In public statements, the Postal Service has previously said information submitted through the portal will be updated immediately. It has said postal employees will not determine voter eligibility or check names and addresses for accuracy. The rule does not disclose the sampling formula or zero-failure policy described in the whistleblower disclosure.
The fight over the Postal Service’s plans is rooted in an executive order from Trump that seeks to overhaul mail voting. A judge has blocked those plans for now, but the administration is seeking to reinstate them ahead of this fall’s midterm elections.
If the administration gets its way, state and local election officials would have to upload lists of voters to an online portal the Postal Service is designing. Postal employees would refuse to deliver to anyone who is not on those lists.
The unnamed official alleged that the portal was assembled under constantly changing requirements and with as few as four working days available for customer testing before a planned launch.
If the Postal Service’s plans go into effect, election officials will confront new challenges when they mail ballots in large batches. Postal workers plan to scan barcodes on a sample of envelopes to ensure the voters appear on the state’s list, according to the whistleblower. If they find even one mismatch, they will refuse to accept the entire batch, the whistleblower said. That means a single mismatch in a batch of 10,000 ballots would prevent the 9,999 other ballots from being mailed until discrepancies were resolved.
“As designed, the process is entirely unforgiving,” the disclosure said. “It could delay ballots by the thousands in repeated verification cycles — and thus prevent states from mailing enormous numbers of ballots.”
State and local officials often mail ballots in large batches to manage them as effectively as possible. Some states send ballots to all registered voters, and they must place millions of ballots in the mail in a short period.
Many election officials have expressed alarm about the Postal Service’s overall plans under Trump’s executive order because they don’t believe they have been adequately thought through for a fast-approaching election.
Among the issues they worry about are potential mismatches for mundane reasons. States constantly update their voter rolls, and the lists they send to the Postal Service could be out of date within minutes as new voters register and existing ones update their registrations because they’ve moved.
The Postal Service has said states can update their voter lists, but election officials have expressed concerns that the new online portal won’t be able to handle a steady stream of updates.
The whistleblower disclosure could add to those concerns and bolster legal challenges to the executive order and postal rules.
The disclosure, dated Sunday, was submitted to Blumenthal by Whistleblower Aid on behalf of an anonymous federal official it represents.
The organization described the unnamed whistleblower as a “federal official with direct knowledge of potentially catastrophic problems in the development” of the Postal Service’s plans and said the official feared reprisal by administration officials if identified.
Blumenthal sent the disclosure late Monday to Postmaster General David Steiner and asked him to provide documents about the Postal Service’s plans.
Blumenthal is the ranking Democrat on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
States and voting rights groups sued over the executive order soon after Trump signed it in March. The Supreme Court last week allowed work on the executive order to proceed for the moment, but days later a lower court blocked it.
The administration is seeking to get it reinstated but faces timing challenges. Officials in North Carolina are preparing to start mailing ballots on Friday under a state law requiring them to send them to those who ask for them starting 60 days before an election. Other states are set to start mailing their ballots in the following days and weeks.
The whistleblower said the Postal Service stopped working on the portal around June 25 after a federal judge blocked implementation of Trump’s directive, then resumed work around July 29 while that order remained in effect.
The disclosure said work continued after the judge issued a new order on Thursday barring the Postal Service for 14 days from taking further preparatory steps that would apply to all states for the November election. In a brief ruling Monday, the judge said the Postal Service could work on the portal for states that want to voluntarily use it.
Postal officials planned to launch the portal on Tuesday, according to the whistleblower. One of the whistleblower’s attorneys, David Kligerman, said work on the portal had continued in recent days but didn’t know whether the Postal Service was sticking with its plan to make it available on Tuesday.
