Postal Service is rushing to implement President Trump’s new rules for mail ballots — despite a court order barring it from doing so — using “an entirely new and untested set of IT systems” that could cause “catastrophic problems” in the November election, according to an agency whistleblower. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), the ranking Democrat on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Among other issues, the whistleblower alleged that the Postal Service’s new Federal Ballot Mail Portal for verifying mail ballots — which Trump demanded in a March executive order and California and other states are challenging in court — has been built in a “slapdash” manner and is “fundamentally flawed.” Thousands of ballots would be invalidated whenever a single ballot’s newly designed Postal Service barcode isn’t properly read, the whistleblower said.
A Postal Service spokesperson said in a statement to The Times that the agency was “carefully reviewing the concerns” raised by Blumenthal and the whistleblower, welcomes oversight and is committed to transparency. The agency has spent months developing its portal “to provide election officials with a simple, secure, and efficient way to share lists of individuals receiving ballots by mail in their respective states,” and is “now finalizing the portal and will soon make it available to election officials who voluntarily wish to familiarize themselves with the platform,” the spokesperson said. The work “has at all times been conducted in a manner consistent with court orders,” the spokesperson said.
Lauren Bis, a White House spokesperson, downplayed the concerns. Postal Service is faulty, untested, and threatens to totally disrupt ballot delivery for millions of American citizens California Atty. Rob Bonta, whose office has been leading the state challenge to the Postal Service changes in court, said his office has been “arguing in court that USPS cannot credibly implement the drastic, unprecedented, and unlawful changes at issue in time for the November midterm elections.” The whistleblower’s statement, he added, “only strengthens that position and underscores the importance of our litigation and other legal challenges to the Trump Administration’s actions.” Other California leaders expressed outrage and demanded the Postal Service plans be abandoned.
Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach), ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, who said his committee had also received the whistleblower’s statement. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) wrote on the same platform. A majority of state voters in a recent poll identified potential interference in the election by the Trump administration as a “major concern.” Trump — who votes by mail himself — has contended without evidence that the changes are necessary to combat widespread voter fraud, including by noncitizens.
Independent elections experts say there is no evidence that such fraud exists in large numbers. Trump’s executive order called on the Postal Service to change its rules to require each state to submit a list of eligible voters to the Postal Service, and to use new ballot envelopes with digital bar codes allowing the Postal Service to identify and reject any that don’t match the lists. The order also called on the Department of Homeland Security to develop its own lists of eligible citizen voters by state, ostensibly to be compared against the state lists.
The Postal Service’s final rule adopting the changes did not claim authority to dictate which voters may appear on state lists, but said the lists would put federal law enforcement in “a better position to identify any potential issues” with ballots. Under President Trump, the federal government is working to ensure safe, transparent, and honest elections Multiple lower court orders in recent months have barred the Postal Service from implementing the changes, though the whistleblower alleged those orders were ignored. Some of those orders were lifted after the Supreme Court last month found that federal agencies could continue to prepare for the changes prior to implementing them.
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