WASHINGTON, September 16 — A government watchdog sued the U.S. Postal Service on Tuesday, demanding records about the agency’s hurried build of an online portal meant to screen mail-in ballots before November’s midterm elections. American Oversight, a Washington, D.C.-based transparency group, filed the suit after USPS declined to grant expedited processing for four Freedom of Information Act requests. The complaint seeks records and internal communications covering the Federal Ballot Mail Portal’s development, and any material showing whether the Postal Service complied with court orders that barred its use.
The timing is not accidental. On Monday, the Supreme Court left in place an injunction blocking USPS from deploying the portal for this year’s midterms.
That order is narrow by design — it covers the 2026 midterms only, leaving the door open for the agency to revive the system in future elections.
What the whistleblower alleged
The dispute traces to a disclosure sent to Sen. Richard Blumenthal in late August. According to that account, USPS pursued a “secretive, rushed” effort to build the portal as a way to implement President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting mail voting. Under the hood, the technical detail that matters is the internal “zero-percent failure policy” the whistleblower described.
Under that rule, an entire batch of ballots — potentially tens of thousands — could be rejected if even a single ballot’s barcode failed to scan or match a state’s list. As ever with batch-processing systems, one bad read can cascade through everything behind it.
The disclosure also alleged that USPS paused work on the portal around June 25, 2026, when a federal court issued an injunction halting implementation of the president’s order. The agency allegedly resumed work around July 29 and kept building for nearly another month, in defiance of the court order, until the injunction was lifted on August 24. The whistleblower warned the portal could have delayed or blocked ballots from the roughly one in three American voters who vote by mail.
Pushback from the White House
Trump responded on Truth Social on Tuesday, denouncing the ruling as causing “irreparable and unrecoverable harm” and complaining that without the portal, Democrats now have “an open field” to commit what he has long — and falsely — claimed is widespread mail-voting fraud. Attorney General Todd Blanche then made clear the Supreme Court’s order would not end the administration’s broader efforts to insert itself into election administration.
“That doesn’t mean that we’re not gonna do everything in this administration that we can to make sure that there are free and fair elections,” he said. Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight, framed the lawsuit as a direct response to that posture.
“The Supreme Court may have blocked this portal for the midterms, but the administration’s efforts to interfere with our elections are far from over,” she said in a statement. “The president attacked the Court’s ruling, and his attorney general made clear that they will keep looking for other ways to insert themselves into how our elections are run.” She added that the records could also reveal whether the USPS officials who pushed the portal forward are involved in other Trump administration efforts to limit ballot access.
“A federal whistleblower says USPS rushed to build an untested system that could have stopped millions of voters from receiving their ballots, and kept working on it even after a judge ordered it to stop,” Chukwu said. “The public deserves to know who approved this, how far USPS was prepared to go, and what else may be underway.
That’s why we’re going to court.” What to watch next is whether USPS hands over the requested records voluntarily or forces the watchdog to press its case in court — and whether the paper trail names the officials who kept the portal moving after a judge told them to stop.
