A Postal Whistleblower Told a Senator the New Federal Ballot System Will Fail. A Judge Has Already Frozen It.

An anonymous Postal Service employee has told the office of Sen. Richard Blumenthal that the agency's new federal mail-voting system is untested, badly built and headed for what the disclosure calls a "catastrophic failure" that could "derail the midterm elections."

The complaint, dated Aug. 31 and released by the Connecticut Democrat's office, describes the effort to build the U.S. Federal Ballot Mail Portal as "rushed, chaotic and fundamentally flawed." According to the whistleblower, the portal was assembled against deadlines that could not be met, and the standard quality assurance and debugging steps that normally precede a nationwide rollout were dropped to keep the schedule. The employee described the development process as slapdash, risky and haphazard.

The specific design choice that alarms the whistleblower is a zero-percent failure policy. Under it, if a single ballot in a batch fails to scan or its barcode does not match the federal record, the entire batch is rejected until the discrepancy is cleared. Batches can run to tens of thousands of ballots. Voters whose ballots were caught in a rejected batch would not necessarily be told, and in a system where the ballot must arrive by a deadline, the first sign of a problem could come after it is too late to fix.

The complaint also alleges that the Postal Service kept working on the portal through July even though a court order had paused the work. A federal judge has since issued a temporary restraining order blocking the system from being used before November's elections while the court weighs whether the underlying rules are lawful. The first overseas and military ballots ship Friday. The Postal Service said it is carefully reviewing the whistleblower's claims.

The portal exists because of an executive order Trump signed in March directing his administration to build federal lists of citizens and to refuse delivery of mail ballots to people who do not appear on them. Twenty-three states sued over that order in April, arguing it was an unconstitutional seizure of an authority the Constitution leaves to the states. A federal judge blocked part of it in June, and in July the administration asked the Supreme Court to lift the injunction, 14 weeks before the midterms.

Roughly a third of American voters cast their ballots by mail in the last general election, and the share is far higher in states like Utah, Colorado, Oregon and Washington that run all-mail elections. Election administrators have spent the summer building contingency plans on the assumption that the federal portal may not exist in November, may exist only partially, or may exist and not work. County offices in Texas are separately cutting voting sites: Tarrant County has reduced its locations by nearly a third for the midterms.