New Covert USPS System Could Get Millions of Ballots Tossed, Leak Reveals

The United States Postal Service (USPS) has been secretly and, at times, unlawfully working on an unprecedented new screening system that could result in millions of midterm election ballots being thrown out, according to an alarming new whistleblower complaint.

Under pressure to swiftly implement President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting mail-in voting, a USPS whistleblower says the agency is undertaking a “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed process” to make a system that could introduce a set of “potentially catastrophic” problems into this year’s elections and beyond.

The new procedure involves a slate of untested IT systems that would give USPS unprecedented discretion over whether or not it should mail ballots issued by state election officials. It does this through a system called the USPS Federal Ballot Mail Portal, nicknamed the Portal, which screens ballots before allowing them to be mailed.

The system is “entirely new and untested,” the whistleblower complaint says, meaning that there is a “high likelihood” of “major disruptions” to mail-in ballot procedures.

The Portal is currently designed to have a zero percent failure rate. This means that, if a single ballot in a batch from election officials isn’t properly scanned or verified against USPS’s system, then the entire batch of 10,000 ballots would be thrown out entirely.

“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 and sent back to the state — effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed to voters,” says the complaint, prepared by legal group Whistleblower Aid based on information from someone who has helped to build the system.

“Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,” it goes on. The whistleblower’s testimony adds up to a “compelling warning of catastrophic failure which could derail the midterm elections.”

Paired with a flawed system that was rushed to completion, the changes to USPS could result in millions of Americans never receiving their mail-in ballot. During the midterms in 2022, USPS delivered over 54 million ballots, and roughly a third of Americans voted by mail, according to data analyzed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Election Data & Science Lab. In the 2024 presidential election, about 29 percent voted by mail.

“The main takeaway for me is that the Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans. One-third of all Americans cast their ballots by mail, and the U.S.P.S. puts all of their votes at risk,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), whose office received and shared the complaint, per The New York Times.

USPS leaders have “discarded all best practices” in order to ensure the project gets implemented by September 1, even though it has undergone very little testing and the protocols for the number of ballots that get scanned per batch have not been outlined. USPS officials who have worked on the process have described it as “a shit show,” the whistleblower said.

As part of the rushed process, USPS has allowed the project to be worked on in violation of court stoppages. The complaint says that work stopped after a federal judge issued an injunction against Trump’s order on June 25, saying that only states can make determinations about voter eligibility. However, work resumed on the project just weeks later, despite no change in the legal situation.