On September 1, 2026, Sen. Richard Blumenthal made public a letter to Postmaster General David Steiner relaying an account from a Postal Service official about how the agency is building the mail-ballot system required by Trump's March executive order. The whistleblower describes the work as “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed,” warns of “potentially catastrophic problems” once ballots start moving, and says USPS built in weeks a system that would normally take nine months to a year.
One operational detail explains the alarm better than any adjective. According to the account, if a state election official delivers a batch of 10,000 ballots and USPS cannot match a single one against the portal, USPS would refuse to mail the other 9,999 as well, and would expect the state to take back the entire batch to fix the one. A single record mismatch could stop ten thousand ballots.
The whistleblower also says testing procedures for the portal platform were eliminated to meet what were described as impossible deadlines, a shortcut the official said could “derail the midterm elections,” and that “potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all.”
The timeline is the second allegation. The account says USPS has been building the portal since June and continued that work while federal injunctions barred it from implementing the order, which Blumenthal's letter characterizes as part of a “pattern of defiance of court orders.” The Supreme Court lifted one injunction on August 24 on standing grounds without ruling on the order's legality, and Judge Talwani blocked the USPS final rule with a restraining order on August 27 (see The USPS Mail-Ballot Rule Is Blocked for November, and the Post Office Issued It as a Final Rule Anyway and The Supreme Court Lifts One of Two Injunctions on Trump's Mail Voting Order, Ruling 6-3 That the States Sued Too Soon Rather Than That the Order Is Lawful).
Blumenthal's characterization: “the Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans. One-third of all Americans cast their ballots by mail, and the USPS puts all of their votes at risk.” That is a senator's framing of a single official's account, and it should be read as such. What the account itself supplies, and what makes it worth recording, is technical and specific: the build timeline, the removal of testing, and the batch-rejection behavior. USPS has not publicly rebutted the technical claims.