Who Decided the Post Office Should Be a Gatekeeper for Our Votes?
A tray of 10,000 mail ballots arrives at a postal facility. A worker scans a sample of roughly 400. If one barcode fails to read, the entire tray goes back to the state and the verification starts from scratch. That is how the Postal Service built its new system for handling our ballots, according to a whistleblower disclosure made public Tuesday and reported by CBS News.
The disclosure comes from an anonymous federal official with direct knowledge of the project, represented by the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid. It went to Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, who forwarded it to Postmaster General David Steiner along with a letter demanding answers. The official’s central claim, as NPR reported, is that the Postal Service rushed an untested online portal into service to carry out President Trump’s executive order restricting mail voting, and that the shortcuts could derail the midterm election if courts allow the plan to proceed.
The mechanics matter. Under a final rule the Postal Service published last month, states would upload the names and addresses of every voter receiving a mail ballot, plus a unique barcode printed on each envelope, into a federal portal. Postal workers would then deliver ballots only to voters on that list. The whistleblower says testing was cut to meet a Sept. 1 launch date, that staff on the project disagreed about how the system was supposed to function, and that a zero percent failure policy means a single bad scan bounces an entire batch. The disclosure warns that ballots could be delayed by the thousands in repeated verification cycles.
This is not a niche concern. Roughly 30 percent of all ballots cast in the 2024 general election came by mail, more than 48 million votes, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Six states run their elections entirely by mail, per CBS News, and four more plus the District of Columbia send ballots to every registered voter. Military families, seniors, shift workers, rural voters and people with disabilities rely on this method. Mail voting for the midterms begins this week, NPR reported.
The administration’s position deserves a fair hearing. The president has said the new rules are needed to stop illegal voting by noncitizens. NPR notes that many studies and audits have found such voting to be extremely rare. Not to mention, the president has himself cast ballots in Florida by mail.
The legal fight is unresolved. A federal judge in Boston issued a temporary restraining order last week after finding the Postal Service likely has no authority to control voting by mail and the administration has appealed to the First Circuit. The Supreme Court earlier dismissed a challenge from 23 states led by Democrats on procedural grounds while cautioning that its ruling did not mean any specific implementation measure would be lawful. The whistleblower further alleges that Postal Service staff kept building the portal after the court ordered a halt. The agency did not respond to NPR’s questions.
The practical steps are straightforward. If we plan to vote by mail, we request our ballot early and track it through our state’s system. We keep an in-person option available in case the mail ballot never comes. And we remember that the Postal Service answers to the same administration whose order it is racing to implement, which leaves Congress as the body with real oversight power. Every candidate on our ballot this fall should be asked directly: when a tray of 10,000 ballots gets sent back, what will you do about it? Go beyond the headlines…
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