Whistleblower warns USPS mail ballot screening system risks rejecting batches of votes

The whistleblower disclosure

An anonymous federal official represented by Whistleblower Aid has submitted a report to Congress detailing operational flaws in a new Postal Service mail-in ballot screening system. Senator Richard Blumenthal, the top Democrat on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, released the findings on 1 September in a letter to Postmaster General David Steiner. The disclosure asserts that the Federal Ballot Mail Portal was hastily constructed to execute a March executive order from President Donald Trump. Blumenthal argued that the agency lacks the operational capability to deploy the portal safely before midterm election ballots are mailed to voters.

USPS will, for the first time, play a gatekeeping function and be in a position to refuse to mail ballots that state election officials have determined should be sent out.

Zero-failure policy and batch rejections

Under the proposed screening framework, state election administrators must submit approved envelope designs and upload registered voter lists with barcode data into the federal portal. Postal clerks then scan sample batches of between 15 and 400 ballots against the uploaded database upon physical delivery. The whistleblower disclosure states that the agency implemented a zero-percent failure policy, meaning a single unverified entry causes the rejection of an entire batch. If one ballot among 10,000 cannot be matched due to an address update or name change after marriage, USPS would turn away the remaining 9,999 ballots. The report notes that states would be forced to retrieve rejected batches without any established appeal mechanism for voters or local officials.

This dangerously defective mail-in ballot process could disenfranchise millions of voters, ensnaring ballots in red tape under the guise of solving a non-existent problem.

Compressed development and testing

Postal engineers and technical specialists assembled the complete portal for initial testing on 24 August, leaving only a brief period to identify glitches before ballots are distributed. Development took roughly three months, including a period paused by litigation, whereas comparable federal software projects normally take between nine months and one year. Internal communications cited in the disclosure described the project atmosphere as chaotic, with staff raising concerns over unverified systems. White House spokesperson Lauren Bis defended the program, stating that software verification is standard practice for an agency that handles high-volume barcoded commercial mail.

Legal battles and election preparations

The portal stems from a March executive order directing federal agencies to establish lists of confirmed eligible citizens and barring USPS from delivering ballots to individuals not verified on those lists. Twenty-three states and Washington, D.C. challenged the order in court, arguing that the federal government is usurping state constitutional control over elections. The Supreme Court allowed the executive order to stand on preliminary grounds, but District Judge Indira Talwani subsequently issued a temporary restraining order against the USPS regulations published on 21 August in the Federal Register. Approximately one-third of American voters cast ballots by mail in 2024, while a 2025 study from the Brookings Institution found mail-in voting fraud occurred in four cases per 10 million ballots. Blumenthal demanded that Steiner provide written answers by Friday and deliver internal agency records by the following Tuesday.