President Donald Trump is implementing a largely secret plan to cheat during the 2026 midterm elections in November, according to an explosive whistleblower report released Tuesday. And the plan is much worse than you probably imagined.
Roughly 30% of voters in the U.S. cast their ballot by mail, and the U.S. Postal Service is working on a program that would refuse to deliver ballots to people deemed ineligible to vote by the federal government. That part is known and has been the focus of litigation ever since President Trump signed an executive order in March to create a national list of eligible voters.
What’s newly revealed, according to a whistleblower report from an anonymous government employee, is that the digital system they’re working on to reject ballots would toss out every ballot mailed in large batches through USPS, even if just one ballot was ruled invalid. The new system requires states to hand over voter names and address information to the federal government in order for USPS to deliver that person a ballot, effectively giving the Trump regime veto power over who gets to vote.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, wrote a letter to Postmaster General David Steiner dated Aug. 31 that details his concerns. The letter included a copy of the whistleblower report which describes the new, untested Federal Ballot Mail Portal and supporting IT systems.
The most concerning portion of the letter:
“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.”
To be clear, this appears to be describing the blank ballots as they’re sent out by each state to voters. People who are expecting their ballots would simply not receive them and it’s unclear whether those people would be able to vote in-person or if their rejection by the automated USPS system would act as a pretext to stop them from voting in any fashion.
It’s an astonishing claim and it would destroy confidence in voting if it were to be fully implemented. Tossing out 9,999 ballots among 10,000 because one ballot may be going to someone who’s not eligible to vote (at least by the Trump administration’s standards) could potentially disenfranchise millions of people across the country.
To make matters worse, there’s no clear way for local election leaders to challenge the discarding of ballots, according to the letter. It’s quite obviously a system designed to fail and invalidate all mail-in voting, at least in areas that didn’t vote for Trump in 2024. One can easily imagine a world where Trump orders more scrutiny on blue areas while allowing more flexibility in red areas.
The letter continues:
“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.”
Destroying confidence in the U.S. voting system appears to be one of the goals of President Trump, who has repeatedly claimed that he actually won the 2020 election. That’s obviously a lie, no matter how many times he repeats it. Joe Biden won the election and there has been no evidence of fraud that would’ve changed the outcome of that election.
The new Portal system has been a rushed effort fraught with technical problems, according to the letter. Work began in June, and even though a court issued an injunction that was supposed to halt work, USPS leadership ordered it to continue anyway, according to the whistleblower, who’s being assisted by a group called Whistleblower Aid.
“Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,” Whistleblower Aid said in its warning. “The Whistleblower’s assessment and recitation of the facts around the risky and haphazard development of the project is a compelling warning of catastrophic failure which could derail the midterm elections.”
This is genuinely a worst case scenario for democracy in an ostensibly free country. The election is being held Nov. 3, just 63 days away and North Carolina begins sending out some of the first mail-in ballots to eligible voters on Sept. 4. If Trump is somehow able to implement this system, it will inject chaos and confusion. Even if Trump eventually loses in court, he may be able to point to the confusion he caused and declare the election invalid somehow. Or at the very least he could declare races where Republicans didn’t win to be invalid.
Trump has a history of pointing to early vote totals on election night as the real count as long as a Republican is winning. If a Democrat eventually wins after all the votes are counted he accuses the other side of cheating. It’s easy to imagine a world where something like that happens in November, but it will all be on steroids thanks to his new USPS system.
