Watchdog Sues for Records on USPS Mail Ballot Portal Following SCOTUS Decision Blocking Midterm Use

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Tuesday, American Oversight filed suit to compel the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to release records on the agency’s rushed attempt to roll out a new online portal to screen mail-in ballots ahead of the November midterm elections, including records that could show whether USPS complied with court orders while doing so. A whistleblower warned the portal could have delayed or blocked ballots from the roughly one in three American voters who vote by mail.

The lawsuit follows the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Monday to leave in place the injunction blocking USPS’s use of the portal for this year’s midterms. But that does not resolve whether USPS can be trusted to comply with the courts going forward: A whistleblower alleges the agency already defied one court order while building the portal.

That concern gained fresh weight on Tuesday, when President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to denounce the ruling as causing “irreparable and unrecoverable harm” and complained 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 subsequently made clear that the Supreme Court’s order would not end the administration’s broader efforts to insert itself into election administration, stating “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.”

The records sought remain important to understanding the full scope of the administration’s efforts to influence elections. The Supreme Court’s order only blocks the portal’s use for the 2026 midterm elections but leaves the door open for USPS to revive it in future elections. 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.

American Oversight filed suit after USPS failed to grant expedited processing for four Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests the watchdog filed seeking records and communications on the Federal Ballot Mail Portal’s development and USPS’s compliance with the court orders that blocked its use. The requests followed a whistleblower disclosure to Sen. Richard Blumenthal in late August alleging that USPS pursued a “secretive, rushed” effort to build the online portal to implement President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting mail voting.

According to the whistleblower disclosure, USPS adopted an internal “zero-percent failure policy” under which 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. The whistleblower 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. USPS allegedly  resumed work on the portal around July 29 and continued building it for nearly another month, in defiance of the court order, until the injunction was lifted on August 24.

“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. 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,” said Chioma Chukwu, Executive Director of American Oversight. “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. 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.”

The president’s order and USPS’s rule implementing it have both faced escalating litigation. A federal court in Massachusetts initially blocked implementation of the executive order for the 23 states that had sued over it in June 2026. The Supreme Court lifted that injunction in late August on the grounds that USPS had not yet issued a final rule — but the day after USPS issued that rule on August 26, the same Massachusetts court barred USPS from requiring the portal as a condition of mailing ballots. That order was converted into a preliminary injunction on September 4. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit declined to stay that order on September 10. Just one day before yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling, a separate federal court in Washington, D.C., blocked the rule in its entirety.

USPS’s inspector general has since opened its own inquiry into the whistleblower’s claims. Meanwhile, Postmaster General David Steiner has defended the portal’s accelerated development, claiming its “standards for quality, security, and system integrity were not compromised.”

American Oversight submitted its four FOIA requests on Sept. 3, 2026, days after the whistleblower disclosure became public. The requests seek communications to or from more than a dozen senior USPS officials referencing the portal and the court orders that intermittently blocked the agency’s work on it. The FOIA requests also seek testing documentation and results for the portal — including its failure rate, false-positive rate, and anticipated ballot-rejection rate — and formal and informal policies governing the rejection and “curing” of ballots and ballot batches flagged by the portal’s verification process.

USPS acknowledged all four requests by email but has not informed American Oversight of a determination on its request for expedited processing — despite a statutory requirement that agencies decide expedited-processing requests within ten calendar days.

Members of Congress, voting rights groups, and elections officials raised concerns that a rushed, inadequately tested system could have delayed or blocked eligible voters’ ballots at a moment when control of Congress may hinge on how those ballots are counted. Although the Supreme Court’s ruling keeps the portal from taking effect this year, the whistleblower’s unresolved allegation that USPS already defied one court order — and the fact that nothing in the high court’s ruling forecloses a future attempt to revive the portal — is exactly the kind of question American Oversight’s requests for records could help answer.