Whistleblower: USPS Defied A Court Injunction To Build An Untested, Undocumented Ballot-Blocking System. Its Own Staff Call The Process “A Shit Show.”

Whistleblower: USPS Defied A Court Injunction To Build An Untested, Undocumented Ballot-Blocking System. Its Own Staff Call The Process “A Shit Show.” from the when-you-it-it-that-way,-it-seems-bad dept Even as Donald Trump regularly uses mail-in ballots himself, he has decided that mail-in ballots are a system by which voting fraud occurs. To be quite clear, this is bullshit. There is astoundingly little evidence of significant voter fraud, and that’s equally true between in-person and voting-by-mail. And there’s zero evidence that mail-in voter fraud has ever even come close to swinging a federal election. Indeed, what little voter fraud there is often involves mixups of people who thought they were eligible to vote accidentally trying to vote when they were ineligible. Either way, a few years back, Trump started blaming mail-in ballots for the completely mythological “rigged elections” he keeps insisting are happening, and of course the MAGA establishment quickly fell into line. We just recently wrote about how the Fifth Circuit appeals court has been working overtime to pretend that it’s well-established that mail-in ballots are insecure. But the bigger issue is that earlier this year, Trump issued an executive order to try to limit the use of mail-in ballots. Specifically, the executive order tells the US Postal Service to engage in a “rulemaking” that is designed to make it much more difficult for states to offer mail-in ballots. And, on top of that, it demands that states that offer mail-in ballots must hand over their voter rolls to the federal government. The White House has been demanding voter rolls from a bunch of states, and so far every state that has engaged in litigation over this issue has won (it’s now over 20 cases, all of which have gone against the administration). On its face, the executive order should be seen as pure nonsense, given that the states get to run elections, not the federal government. And even if it were the federal government, that’s not what executive orders are for. But given that the same Supreme Court that insisted no Democratic president could do literally anything without explicit congressional approval now treats Donald Trump as the very special birthday boy who gets whatever he asks for, we have to take even his most ridiculous demands seriously. A district court judge, Indira Talwani, who is overseeing two of the cases challenging that executive order has issued injunctions in both cases, blocking the US government from putting it into effect. As Talwani notes, the states get to determine how their elections are run, per the Constitution. Article I of the Constitution also empowers the States to prescribe the “Times, Places, and Manner of holding” congressional elections. U.S. CONST. art. I, § 4, cl. 1. “[T]hese comprehensive words embrace authority to provide a complete code for congressional elections, not only as to times and places, but in relation to notices, registration, supervision of voting, protection of voters, prevention of fraud and corrupt practices, counting of votes” among other issues. Smiley v. Holm, 285 U.S. 355, 366 (1932). The President is elected by vote of the Electoral College. See U.S. CONST. amend. XII. The Electors Clause empowers each State to appoint electors to the Electoral College “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” U.S. CONST. art. II, § 1, cl. 2. The States require their electors be appointed by popular vote of qualified voters. See Chiafalo v. Washington, 591 U.S. 578, 584 (2020). Accordingly, the States alone determine voter-eligibility requirements, subject only to the outer limits of the Constitution. See, e.g., U.S. CONST. amend. XIX (“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged . . . on account of sex.”); U.S. CONST. amend. XXVI (“The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote, shall not be denied or abridged . . . on account of age.”). For presidential elections, the Electors Clause gives States the primary authority to decide how electors are chosen. As a result, the court ordered (among other things) the USPS to not take any steps to implement the executive order. Furthermore, in the latter injunction, Talwani pointed out that the federal government failed to present literally any evidence of mail-in voting fraud: The record is devoid of any declarations or other proffered evidence to suggest that mailin voting has resulted in voting by non-citizens. In other words — the DOJ, despite the president insisting that non-citizen voting was happening all the time with mail-in ballots — didn’t even try to present evidence of that to the judge. But this week, a USPS whistleblower revealed that the Postal Service has been building the machinery to implement the order anyway — issuing a final rule on August 26 and, per the disclosure, restarting development around July 29 even though the very clear injunction against doing anything was still in force. The whistleblower went to Senator Richard Blumenthal who released the whistleblower’s report, along with a letter to the Postmaster General demanding an explanation. My office is in receipt of an alarming whistleblower disclosure (the “Disclosure”) outlining the United States Postal Service’s (“USPS”) perilously rushed and potentially unlawful implementation of President Trump’s Executive Order seeking to restrict mail-in voting. The whistleblower’s allegations make clear that USPS lacks the technical or operational capability needed to effectively implement the EO’s provisions in a way that safeguards every citizen’s right to vote in the upcoming midterm elections. Despite this, the Trump Administration appears intent on USPS moving forward with its flawed plans, no matter the chaos they may create. The whistleblower’s allegations also provide disturbing information suggesting that USPS may have violated a court order by continuing to implement the EO despite being ordered to cease all such work. We urge you to abandon this ill-conceived, unconscionable plan and ensure that all Americans can exercise their constitutional right to vote, including by mail, without interference by USPS. The USPS’s defiance of the court order here is pretty direct. The judge issued an injunction on Section 3 of the executive order on June 25th. USPS did, in fact, stop work on the portal, while the DOJ appealed. On July 25th, the appeals court upheld the injunction, noting that the executive order “directs unprecedented levels of involvement by federal officials in how states administer elections.” But just four days later, on July 29th, the whistleblower says that USPS leadership told the IT team to start building a tool to enforce the executive order, in direct and obvious defiance of the injunction against it. Then on August 11th, the district court expanded the injunction, which should have made it even clearer to USPS to stop. But USPS appears to have completely ignored that. While the Supreme Court put a stay on the injunction on August 24th, two days later the district court issued a temporary restraining order. But it appears that basically none of that mattered, as USPS leadership had the IT team continue to work on the thing they were explicitly barred by multiple courts to do. As Blumenthal’s letter summarizes, the USPS rushed to build a portal whose main job appeared to be to block the mailing of mail-in ballots to voters (i.e., this is not them swiping already completed ballots, just refusing to send them to voters in the first place). And because USPS is now run by people whose main qualification is loyalty to Donald Trump, the execution is exactly as incompetent and slapdash as you’d expect: The whistleblower’s Disclosure describes an unprecedented process that allows USPS to decide whether ballots issued by state election officials should be mailed. To do so, USPS is building an entirely new online system, the USPS Federal Ballot Mail Portal and related IT systems (the “Portal”), which will be used to screen ballots submitted by state election officials prior to USPS agreeing to mail them to voters. The Disclosure identifies problems at every stage of USPS’s development of the Portal, demonstrating deeply flawed plans for implementation. According to the whistleblower, USPS’s effort to develop and deploy the Portal has been “rushed,” “risky and haphazard” because leadership has demanded an impossible timeframe. In an effort to meet impossible deadlines, USPS has eliminated standard and needed testing, thereby creating substantial risk of a “catastrophic failure” of the system that could “derail the midterm elections.” What could possibly go wrong: USPS began work building the Portal on or around June 15, 2026 just three months before the date USPS planned to launch the system and just five months before the November 2026 midterm elections. On or about June 25, 2026, USPS ordered work on the Portal to cease due to a court order enjoining implementation of the EO. That work stoppage persisted for approximately a month, further reducing the time that USPS had to build the new system. According to the whistleblower, building the information technology infrastructure necessary to complete the Portal could take a year or more. Yet, USPS leadership demanded that the Portal be completed for a launch date of September 1, 2026, less than six months after the EO was issued. 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 public facing users. The Portal has gone through none of these basic checks. Going beyond just Blumenthal’s summary, the actual whistleblower report has some astounding details about how the bosses at USPS working on this seem to have no clue how to build reliable software (one wonders if they’re ex-DOGE folks): Throughout the development of the project, those giving guidance to tech developers lacked understanding of project parameters. Different team members continued to have different understandings of how the system is supposed to function which caused ongoing and greater confusion among the group. While there continued to be no clear written requirements for the software and IT system, those developing the new election ballot mail IT system were placed in the position of trying to glean requirements from opaque comments at meetings. It continued to be clear that those giving directions did not understand exactly what was to be built. There was a growing concern that many were grasping at straws, trying to do their best to decipher cryptic instructions, and likely missing important details. Elements as basic to the project as whether a validation issue was a “warning” or an “error” continued to be unclear as leadership provided inaccurate information about these issues. To clarify, a warning allows a ballot to continue through the process while an error stops it. These occurrences reinforced the need for written requirements and the ongoing failures in communication. Even so, the team was told that the system had to be ready to launch… by yesterday. They were given less than a month to figure it out. If you know anything about software development, project management, or… just about how anything works, these paragraphs are concerning: Around this time at least one senior USPS official seemed to up the stakes by becoming a more active voice pushing for project completion on the new deadline. For example, when IT workers expressed concerns about the quality of the product under USPS leadership’s compressed timeline, the senior official stated that they (the official) “were not trying to stop anyone from getting their ballots and what is the problem?” Employees went on to reiterate concerns that many teams were still missing details of how systems were supposed to work and that written requirements could ensure that everyone was on the same page. The senior official was dismissive of these concerns. The conversation continued with others repeating the need for clear requirements; while leadership insisted that it was easy to understand what was needed and also that there was no time to write down the requirements. The contradiction was obvious that it should not take a great deal of time to write down something that is easily understood. Concern continued to grow and the Whistleblower became aware that IT teams referred to the largely oral requirements as a “moving target.” By the third week in August “user stories” – short, plain-language descriptions of a software feature written from the perspective of an end-user (focused on what a user wants to achieve and why) – were described as unusable “garbage”. User stories that had been generated had incorrect information and needed to be updated. Throughout this project, the Whistleblower understood that IT teams were siloed and not communicating with one another. Teams had so little understanding what other teams were working on such that when elements were brought together, the teams were unaware of various developments, creating more work to utilize even the completed portions of the work. By August 20, there was a massive rush as teams tried to get “everything committed” – in order to meet the goal of getting the ballot mail systems ready for customer testing on August 24. The resulting chaos caused work to be overwritten. By this point IT workers were resigned that even if they could get the portal put together and working in the internal development environment, there would not be enough time to test and fix any issue that would inevitably arise in customer testing. The system was designated a grand total of four (FOUR!) days of user testing (and it’s not even clear if the testing actually happened): By August 24 the expectation was that if somehow everything was accomplished on Monday the 24th, the code would end up in internal testing on Tuesday, August 25, then move to customer testing on Wednesday, August 26 allowing only four work days to test. For a system that manages something as important as handling voting and ballots, 4 days of user testing is entirely unreasonable. Only leadership seemed to express hope that the September 1 deadline was viable. If a problem was found during testing, which was almost certain, the IT workers would need to fix it and that fix would need to move back to internal testing and then into customer testing again. If a problem wasn’t found in the first 2 days, the fix could not make it back to the customer testing environment in time to meet the deadline. In just the week prior to September 1, 2026, the Whistleblower learned that IT workers have described the election ballot mail development process as “a shit show.” Very confidence building! The whistleblower notes that a similar internal tech project that the USPS IT team built in the past “set aside 47 working days for testing.” And this one gets four. Perhaps an even bigger problem than the slapdash hand-wavey “build a complex system in weeks with no written requirements, and no time for testing,” was the demand for a “zero percent failure rate.” That means that if a single barcode won’t scan — whether because of bad connectivity or a voter got married and changed their name — USPS bounces the entire batch back to the state. And these batches can run to tens of thousands of ballots. Back to Blumenthal’s summary: Not only is this system astonishingly untested, USPS has simultaneously implemented an impracticable zero percent failure rate. 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. As the whistleblower notes, “USPS expects the state to take back the entire batch to cure the issue with the single ballot…” Should the slapdash Portal mistakenly mark a ballot as unverified, there is no clear process by which state election officials or voters themselves can challenge the rejection. The Rule simply vaguely states that they “will be informed of the escalation procedures should they decide to challenge a rejection.” Voters intending to cast ballots by mail may not even be aware that their ballots have been rejected, or were part of a rejected batch, until it is too late to secure an alternative ballot or vote in person. Expecting a well-built, thoughtful Portal to return an accurate result 100 percent of the time is already a stretch—expecting a “rushed,” “risky and haphazard” Portal to do the same is a recipe for disaster. A zero percent failure rate means that a single bad scan (which could happen for any reason) could block thousands of ballots (literally all of which could be legit and fine) from being sent out. Given that eight states already run elections entirely by mail, this could mean significant percentages of voters just not receiving their ballots at all. And, we’re relying on a hastily built system with barely any testing not to have any bad scans that lead to thousands of ballots being blocked. Of course, what Blumenthal and the whistleblower call “risky and haphazard” most others might call “deliberately designed to suppress votes and create chaos that will allow MAGA to call into question the validity of an election.” Look, this is just terrifying: the president and his administration are building a system designed to guarantee that fewer people receive their ballots, in a manner designed to create obvious chaos around an election they don’t expect to win. Whatever you want to call the intent, that’s an executive branch actively degrading the machinery of free and fair elections. That should be the biggest story in the country. Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear that he thinks the federal government works for him, and him alone. It does not. It works for the American people, and a court has already told USPS exactly that, twice. One postal employee understood the assignment well enough to risk their job and blow the whistle over it. It’s about time that more started to do so as well. Filed Under: david steiner, donald trump, election interference, elections, mail-in ballots, richard blumenthal, usps, voting, whistleblower Comments on “Whistleblower: USPS Defied A Court Injunction To Build An Untested, Undocumented Ballot-Blocking System. Its Own Staff Call The Process “A Shit Show.”” Donald Trump and the Republican Party are preparing to declare the midterms null and void. Trump, and the GOP to a lesser extent, wants to hang onto his power for as long as humanly possible—even if it means resorting to nakedly fascist tactics. That besides: You think that military complex beneath the ballroom he’s building is about anything but letting him think he’s safe as he tries to hold onto power come the 20th of January 2029? Re: There’s a very hard upper-limit on “as long as humanly possible”, and that’s the lifespan of a human being. The realities of biology might be what ensures that we have a democratically-elected president in the White House in 2029. Re: Now, there can be no Mark Milley to save us. Mark Milley saved the 2020 election. Trump learned his lesson. Now, there can be no Mark Milley. And… That’s bad. This is worse: Trump installed Pete Hegseth to transform the military into an organ of the Trump apparatus. Even if, hypothetically, Dan Caine or anyone else in the upper brass wanted to be a Milley, I doubt they even could—and that’s… a helluvan “if”. Re: Re: Consider the attempted self-coup of Yoon Suk Yeol, then. He installed plenty of subordinates and lackeys in various positions in the South Korean government; some of those positions involved the military. But when Yoon declared martial law and attempted his self-coup, the military largely didn’t coöperate. A lot of soldiers questioned, delayed carrying out, or even outright disobeyed their orders. And in the end, Yoon’s self-coup failed partly because the military wasn’t 100% on-board with his plans. I’m sure some soldiers in the U.S. Armed Forces would be willing to follow Hegseth and Trump into their fascist paradise. But whether those two would have enough support to keep the rest of the Armed Forces, federal LEOs, and even regular-ass American citizens at bay while the coup attempt goes down is an open question. I’d like to think the answer is “no”; given the state of the country these days, I’m not so sure I can say it’s a given. Re: Re: Re: Scenarios. I agree. I simply dropped a few hints without expounding on what I think about this. Being terse (and not diverging too much into what could incite an alarmist type of discussion, which, among other effects, could wrongly demoralize voters into not bothering to vote when we need everybody to fucking vote). The only way to answer that “open question” empirically is… bad. Also BTW, did you see the part of the article I linked about General Milley’s efforts to assure the security of nuclear weapons in 2020? In your historical example, does South Korea have nuclear weapons? That’s on a long list of… worrisome scenarios. Same. I have many thoughts on this. Mostly pessimistic. Re: Sure. I have a great deal of confidence that it’s also about money laundering. The way this will work Millions of votes will get cast out by faulty procedures. That this is the first time this happens will be cited as proof that previous elections were fraud-infested. The focus on throwing out votes will be on those states most affected by “fraud”, namely those not voting for Trump and/or the Republican party. If not even throwing out enough votes will guarantee a Republican win, where possible electors will be picked by Republican state legislature in order to contermand the “corrupted” elections. Re: That’s why you make plans now to vote in-person come November. Trump wants every excuse he can think of to claim the results of the midterms (should they go the way they’re projected to go) are invalid. We The People should make sure he has no such excuses available to him. Re: Re: Which is why in urban regions predominantly voting Democratic there will be far too few voting stations, voting will take hours (on a workday) if you even manage at all, and handing food or water to people in the queue will be prohibited. Armed officers or militia (among others, Proud Boys and Oath Keepers) will harrass everyone not looking suitably white. People with foreign-sounding names will figure out at voting day that they have been removed from the voter rolls without notice (mail voting has the advantage that you’ll still have time to fix this if you are early enough). Voting in person is probably your best bet, but starting at least two months in advance, check every week that you are still registered to vote. The Trump administration does not care about reasonable deadlines before election for tampering with the voter rolls. Re: Re: NOT EVERYBODY CAN VOTE IN-PERSON! NOT EVERYBODY CAN VOTE IN-PERSON! Mail-in voting is already damaged! These issues affect real people. I personally know a disabled person whose mail-in ballot vanished into thin air in the 2025 off-year election. They physically have no other way to vote. They have no choice but either to use mail-in ballots, or to give up on voting. Trump has already damaged the USPS to reduce access to the ballot through mail delays and unreliability. He did it in 2020, too. That was bad. Now is already worse. If this unconstitutional new vote-blocking system isn’t shut down and burnt to the ground, it will turn worse into exponentially even-worse-than-so-much-worse in Trump’s infinite abyss of worseness. Trump and the whole Republican Party may as well shrug off the stupid pretense that U.S. citizens have any say about who rules over them with an iron fist. For the benefit of the uninitiated, this is just how software development in any corporate (or government) environment works all the time. Nothing about this sounds in any way unusual. Also, it’s completely normal for organizations to build IT software to meet requirements before those requirements are legally required. Yes, the injunction told them not to implement it, but if the injunction suddenly goes away then the development team needs to be able to flip a switch and comply with the regulation. No, I’m not saying any of this to give cover to the regime. I’ve just spent 15 years developing software in corporate America, a lot of it with tax software and boy howdy, if you think the IRS will cut you a break on some rule going live Jan 1st because they couldn’t be assed to finish making the rule until the second week of December have I got a bag of stories to tell you. Re: So, Dilbert’s PHB overrules a Federal judge. Seriously? Software project management inside a U.S. agency is a higher authority than a court order which says, I quote, “Defendants, other than the President, are hereby ORDERED that they must, in good faith, take such steps as are necessary to prevent explicit or implicit implementation of Sections 2, 3 and 5 of the EO, and to cease and reverse any implementation of those provisions…” and other very explicit language? Really? Damn I wanna job as a PHB in DailyWTF-land. (“Defendants” here include inter alia the U.S. Postal Service, the Postmaster General, the Deputy Postmaster General, and the Chairperson, Vice Chairperson, and members of the U.S. Postasl Service Borad of Governors. Section 3 of the EO is the relevant one here.) Re: Re: There is a distinction between “install this” and “be ready to install this at a moment’s notice” is all I’m saying. Be kind to the pencil pushers in IT. They aren’t doing it this way because they have a nefarious plan to overturn the US legal system. That’s just how the IT sausage factory works. Re: Re: Re: Some of them might. Re: Re: Re: Is that legal advice about what to do when a judge says you are “hereby ORDERED” not to do this? Is it how courts and laws work? This is more of a statement of how things are supposed to work than how they currently work.