Fifteen pages. That is the length of the complaint American Oversight filed on Tuesday against the U.S. Postal Service, and it asks a blunt question: what, exactly, was USPS building, and did it keep building after a judge said stop? Law&Crime, which reviewed the filing, reported that the watchdog accuses the agency of breaking the Freedom of Information Act by sitting on records about an online portal meant to screen mail-in ballots before the November midterms.
The suit arrived in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling that left in place a lower-court injunction keeping USPS from enforcing the underlying rule in this year’s elections.
Why the group says it cannot wait
The watchdog argues the ruling settles less than it appears to. On Tuesday morning, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social and called the decision a “bad decision” that would cause “irreparable and unrecoverable harm.” Attorney General Todd Blanche also made remarks that, in the plaintiffs’ telling, renewed worries about the government’s “broader efforts to insert itself into election administration.”
The complaint itself says as much in dry legal prose. The Supreme Court order stops USPS from moving ahead for November, it concedes, but plans for later elections “remain uncertain and opaque.”
A paper trail of ignored orders
American Oversight points to the litigation history. Two district court cases produced two injunctions against work on the rule, issued several months apart. In one, the government fought its way through the appeals process. In the other, according to Law&Crime’s account of the filing, it simply carried on.
The complaint leans on a whistleblower for that point. “Alarmingly, the whistleblower also alleged, that work on the Portal had been ongoing for at least part of the time that a June 2026 court order blocking it was in effect,” it states.
The same whistleblower letter described the technical side bluntly: “The apparently sloppy and rushed manner in which the Federal Ballot Mail Portal and supporting IT systems are being built poses significant risk.” Potentially millions of voters, it warned, might not get a mail-in ballot on time, “or at all.”
One design detail drew particular attention. According to American Oversight, USPS adopted an internal “zero-percent failure policy.” Under it, a whole batch of ballots, potentially tens of thousands, could be rejected if a single ballot’s barcode failed to scan or match a state’s list. One bad read, in other words, sinks the batch.
The requests behind the lawsuit
American Oversight says it sent four separate FOIA requests covering the portal’s development and testing, the protocols for curing mismatches, and communications among top USPS officials about those matters and the relevant court orders. The complaint says USPS denied expedited processing for all of them.
“The public deserves to know who approved this, how far USPS was prepared to go, and what else may be underway,” said Chioma Chukwu, the group’s executive director. “That’s why we’re going to court.”
