The U.S. Postal Service has been swiftly developing a complex screening system for mail-in ballots ahead of this year’s midterm elections, despite ongoing legal wranglings over President Trump’s executive order to restrict voting by mail.
The new system, which requires states to tell the Postal Service which voters will be sent ballots so they can be verified before delivery, shows how aggressively the Postal Service is moving to deliver on the president’s directive ahead of the upcoming elections, which could tip the scales of power in Congress.
The agency’s efforts to set up a way to restrict who gets mail ballots, even as the matter is being fought over in the courts, could cause confusion among voters and undermine confidence in the Postal Service as states are close to getting ballots out the door, current and former state officials said. If the new screening system is ultimately put in place, it could jeopardize the ability of people to receive and cast their ballots, they said.
“It impacts not only voters’ ability to vote, but also their faith in a free and fair system that’s equal for all of us who are eligible to vote,” said Kathy Boockvar, a former Democratic secretary of state in Pennsylvania who now consults with officials on election security.
More than two dozen Democratic state attorneys general and voting rights organizations have challenged Mr. Trump’s order in the courts, arguing it violates the Constitution’s provision giving states the responsibility to run elections. Critics have said they fear Mr. Trump may be trying to control the delivery of mail ballots in order to interfere with the midterm elections. Mr. Trump has said the measure is essential to protect the security of elections.
Despite a court order temporarily barring the Postal Service from implementing the president’s plan to restrict mail-in voting, the agency acknowledged on Tuesday that it had continued to develop the portal in case it is permitted to move forward. It asserted that the work is legally permissible, since states have not yet been required to use the portal.
But a whistle-blower said this week that the screening portal is being developed in a rushed and sloppy manner that could jeopardize voting by mail across the country. The Postal Service has disputed that characterization, while acknowledging that it is rapidly running out of time to have the system ready for this year’s midterms.
Twenty states are set to mail ballots to voters by Sept. 19. The first up is North Carolina, where county election boards will begin sending out absentee ballots on Friday.
Jason Tyson, a spokesman for the state’s board of elections, said North Carolina had no current plans to use the new Postal Service portal.
In Wisconsin, where ballots are slated to go out on Sept. 17, a top elections official has said it would be “virtually impossible” for the state to comply with the new Postal Service requirements around mail ballots, according to a new filing in federal court. Election offices, particularly those in rural counties with few staff members, do not have time to manually add the codes that would be required on each envelope under the new rules, the state said.
The Postal Service’s ballot screening plan is a key part of the president’s effort to restrict voting by mail, a practice that most recently has been used more often by Democrats than Republicans. Under the executive order Mr. Trump signed in March, the administration is moving to create state-by-state lists of citizens to help determine voting eligibility and is seeking to require states to submit their voter data to the Postal Service in order to have their mail ballots delivered.
Mr. Trump has publicly said that restricting mail voting could help Republicans retain control of Congress in the upcoming elections. He has also repeatedly promoted false claims of widespread mail-in voting fraud, even as he voted by mail in two elections this year.
According to the whistle-blower, a federal official who filed a report that was shared with Congress, the Postal Service is building a complex system to compile voter data and screen ballot eligibility through a process that is far below the standards of basic software development norms. The whistle-blower said this happened over a period of weeks, instead of the typical timeline of about eight months to a year for such projects.
According to the whistle-blower and court filings, the online portal would work like this: States would upload to the new Postal Service portal a list of the names of voters who will be sent mail ballots, along with their addresses and unique bar codes. States would have to use Postal Service-approved envelopes for all mail ballots designed to make the bar codes scannable.
Once election offices put ballots in the mail for delivery, the Postal Service would screen the ballots before accepting them by scanning the bar codes on their envelopes to make sure that the recipient is included in the list of voters uploaded to the portal.
The agency would reject ballots and not deliver them if the bar code on even one ballot in a tranche of as many as 10,000 does not match the data in the portal, according to a Postal Service fact sheet. In those cases, the ballots would be returned to election offices, which could correct any errors.
Such a mis-scan could delay the entire bulk mailing, according to the whistle-blower report. Scanning bar codes routinely leads to errors, and the whistle-blower said the new system could be rife with problems because of its rushed development and inadequate testing.
The whistle-blower described a project that was never clearly defined to the developers and lacked written requirements. As a result, requirements for the system often changed from week to week amid ongoing concerns that the system would not be adequately tested, the whistle-blower said. At the beginning of August, software developers were told to have the system ready to go by Sept. 1.
On Tuesday, Representatives Robert Garcia of California and Joseph D. Morelle of New York asked the Postal Service’s inspector general to investigate the new online portal. Mr. Garcia is the top Democrat on the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Mr. Morelle is the top Democrat on the House Administration committee.
The Postal Service, where Mr. Trump has been seeking to install his allies in oversight roles, said the system had been in development for months and would soon be available to states that want to learn how it will work. In a statement on Tuesday, the agency said the portal would “provide election officials with a simple, secure, and efficient way to share lists of individuals receiving ballots by mail in their respective states.”
In a July 1 court statement, the Postal Service described a period of training for agency workers and states on how to use the system before it is ready for prime time.
“For states to be ready to use the portal, we need enough time prior to the November 2026 election to train our employees on use of the portal, and to coordinate with mailers,” Steven Monteith, the agency’s chief customer and marketing officer and executive vice president, said in the statement.
But Jonathan Smith, president of the American Postal Workers Union, which represents 200,000 agency workers across the country, said no one in the union had received any training on how to use the new system.
“At this time, to our knowledge, no postal clerk, either in a business mail entry unit or at a post office retail location, has been trained on how they will be expected to accept, validate or reject any election mail consistent with the executive order,” Mr. Smith said in a statement on Wednesday.
A spokeswoman for Oklahoma’s election board said the state had reached out to the Postal Service seeking instructions for how to comply with the new rule, but had not heard back.
Nick Corasaniti and Zach Montague contributed reporting.
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