Until the release of a whistleblower dossier on Monday, one could be relatively hopeful that a string of court decisions would prevent the U.S. Postal Service from carrying out Trump’s orders to slow-walk mail-in voting. As I wrote in this piece last Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani has enjoined the Postal Service from implementing its plans, pending a full hearing scheduled for tomorrow.
Now, however, a whistleblower lays out new alarming details. In a letter to Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), the whistleblower, described as a government official, explains how the Postal Service is rushing to build an online portal that will be used to screen ballots submitted by state election officials prior to USPS agreeing to mail them to voters.
According to the whistleblower complaint, building the information technology infrastructure necessary to complete the portal would normally take a year or more. Yet, USPS leadership ordered that the portal be completed for a launch date of September 1, 2026. That was yesterday.
As a result of this rushed process, USPS has been unable to conduct tests of the portal to ensure its proper functioning, troubleshoot problems, or distribute instructions on use to state election officials. According to the whistleblower, the portal “violates standard principles of testing and debugging new software before launch.” Normal procedures at USPS for such systems include internal testing, customer acceptance testing, and a final development stage before release to end users. The portal has gone through none of these basic checks.
As Blumenthal points out, under the portal, “When ballots are submitted to USPS in large-volume batches, if any one ballot in the batch cannot be verified against the portal, all ballots in that batch will be rejected. For example, if a state election official brings a batch of 10,000 ballots to USPS and USPS is unable to match just one of those ballots against the portal—because, for example, someone has recently changed their name after marriage or they’ve moved—then USPS would refuse to mail the remaining 9,999 ballots as well.”
What’s clear is that if the system goes forward, it gives the Trump administration three possible ways to undermine the 2026 election. Either state officials are forced to comply with a buggy system that will lose millions of mail-in ballots. Or officials in some states will refuse to comply and the Postal Service will refuse to deliver their ballots. Or the sheer confusion and publicity will deter large numbers of citizens from voting. And complaints will be tied up in court until long after the election.
In 2024, roughly 48 million people voted by mail. They were disproportionately Democrats.
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I have been skeptical of concerns that Trump will try to pull off some kind of Election Day coup by sending in ICE or the military to block voting. But the USPS slow-rolling coup, unless blocked by the courts, could do almost as much damage. It’s already the case that the Postal Service failed to deliver about 10,000 mail-in ballots in the Michigan Democratic primary in time for them to be counted, due to underfunding and incompetence.
According to the whistleblower, the USPS has continued work on the portal despite several court orders directing it to suspend its plans. In a letter to Postmaster General David Steiner on Monday, Blumenthal wrote, “Please state whether USPS has halted work to implement the Executive Order, in compliance with the August 27, 2026 temporary restraining order.” So far, he has received no reply.
But in a statement released Tuesday, the Postal Service seemed to be thumbing its nose at both Blumenthal and the courts: “The Postal Service is now finalizing the portal and will soon make it available to election officials who voluntarily wish to familiarize themselves with the platform,” the statement said. “USPS will also provide tools, presentations, and other resources to help election officials understand the platform and make informed decisions about whether and how they wish to use it.”
The Postal Service has only one duty: to deliver the mail. It has no legitimate role in elections.
The lower courts have been doing their jobs in blocking Trump’s postal scheme, but the Supreme Court’s coy pattern has been to allow illegal conduct to proceed, pending some final judgement that is often effectively moot by the time it is rendered. The most recent instance of this gambit is the Court’s 5-4 ruling to allow construction of Trump’s grotesque ballroom to proceed.
Enabling the desecration of the White House is bad enough. It would be far more serious if the high court enabled the postal desecration of our democracy.
The first postmaster general, you may recall, was Benjamin Franklin. When Franklin, emerging from the Constitutional Convention in 1797, famously told a bystander that the Founders had created “a democracy, if you can keep it,” he had no way of knowing that his beloved Post Office might be the instrument of democracy’s destruction.
