The U.S. Postal Service is trying to rush through President Donald Trump's scheme to restrict mail-in ballots at the federal level — but his own voters could be a huge casualty of the plan.
Ryan Goodman, a professor at New York University, highlighted a critical line from a New York Times report on the plan, saying that, "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."
"This part could backfire on the White House and red state officials that go along with it," Goodman wrote on X — as many areas meeting this criteria are reliable votes for the GOP.
A USPS whistleblower report, released by Sen. Richard Blumenthal's office, alleges the agency built the new system in a matter of weeks rather than the nine months to a year typically needed for a project of this scale, describing the rollout as "secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed." The new tool, called the Federal Ballot Mail Portal, requires states to tell USPS in advance which voters will receive ballots so they can be screened and verified before delivery even begins.
According to The New York Times, under the system, postal workers would scan a sample ballot from batches as large as 10,000 to confirm the recipient matches the portal's approved list — and reject the entire batch if it doesn't match, sending everything back to election offices to sort out.
Election officials warn the rushed rollout risks real chaos. Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania's former Democratic secretary of state, said the stakes go well beyond logistics.
"It impacts not only voters' ability to vote, but also their faith in a free and fair system," Boockvar said.
More than two dozen Democratic state attorneys general have already sued over Trump's order, arguing it violates states' constitutional authority to run their own elections. Despite a court order temporarily blocking implementation, USPS admitted this week it kept developing the portal anyway, insisting the work is legal since states haven't yet been required to use it.
Making matters more complicated, Jonathan Smith, president of the American Postal Workers Union representing 200,000 agency employees, says training for the new system hasn't happened at all — no postal clerk anywhere has been shown how to accept, validate or reject ballots under the new rules. With North Carolina's county boards mailing ballots starting Friday and 20 states set to follow by September 19, Wisconsin officials have already told a federal court it would be "virtually impossible" for rural counties to comply with the new barcode requirements in time.
Reps. Robert Garcia (D-CA) and Joseph Morelle (D-NY) have asked USPS's inspector general to investigate the portal, while Trump has publicly said restricting mail voting — used more often recently by Democrats — could help Republicans hold onto Congress, even as he's voted by mail himself twice this year.