A federal whistleblower has told a U.S. senator that the Postal Service's brand-new system for policing mail ballots under President Trump's voting order is so rushed and buggy it could wipe out thousands of legitimate ballots with a single scanning glitch, according to a disclosure made public this week by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).

The whistleblower, an anonymous federal employee represented by the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid, says the Postal Service's new "Federal Ballot Mail Portal" is built to reject an entire batch of ballots — potentially 10,000 at a time — if even one barcode fails to scan properly during verification. The rejected batch gets bounced back to state election officials instead of going out to voters. "As presently designed, if even one bar code on one single ballot in a bulk-mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to properly scan during the verification process, the entire batch is rejected," the complaint states, calling the process "entirely unforgiving."

The portal is one of three linked systems USPS built to enforce Trump's March executive order requiring the agency to check mail ballots against a federally vetted voter list before delivering them — an unprecedented expansion of the Postal Service's role beyond simply carrying the mail. Development reportedly began in June, a fraction of the nine-to-twelve months such systems normally take, and the whistleblower says multiple USPS officials privately described the rushed build as "a shit show."

A Rollout Already Under a Judge's Thumb

The portal had a planned September 1 launch even though Trump's underlying order remains blocked by a federal court temporary restraining order while its constitutionality is litigated. That order lets USPS keep building the system as long as states aren't forced to use it yet — a carve-out critics say let the agency barrel ahead on untested code anyway. Roughly 47 million Americans voted by mail in the 2024 election, the scale of voters the new checks would touch.

"This administration seems hell-bent on changing the framework of casting ballots in this country, clearly for political reasons," Blumenthal said of the disclosure, according to NBC News.

House Democrats led by Rep. Robert Garcia of California demanded USPS "immediately cease implementation," branding the systems "faulty" and potentially illegal. David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, called the whistleblower's findings "highly specific and troubling" and said USPS appears "totally unprepared" for the responsibility it's been handed. The White House disputed the allegations, telling reporters the process was "neither complex nor unique."

With the 2026 midterms less than nine weeks away and control of the House and Senate on the ballot, the dispute adds fresh urgency to the ongoing court fight over Trump's mail-voting order. Lawmakers are pressing USPS for answers on the system's testing record, and election-law advocates say the whistleblower's account is likely to surface as evidence in the pending litigation. For now, the portal remains live in test mode — with millions of mail voters' ballots riding on whether its barcode scanners get it right.