The whistleblower, described by lawyers as a federal official, disclosed information about the Postal Service's new mail-voting procedures to Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.
Page A9From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 1 September 2026
Officials defy court orders on mail voting while their own ballot portal runs 'untested.'
As it ran on the front
Excuse me -- sorry, I'm running behind, my coat's got receipts falling out of every pocket these days. Here, hold on... ah, here it is. Page one, a federal judge's order, plain as anything: comply on mail ballots. And right under it, stapled, this from the whistleblower -- Postal Service officials describing their own ballot portal as, and I wrote this down word for word, 'rushed' and 'untested.' Untested. That word keeps following me around.
Now I'm no computer man. But my wife's cousin installs alarm systems, and he told me once, you never wire a house you haven't walked through first, you don't know where the doors are. That's not from the file, that's just something I think about at night. Because what we've got on paper here is: a court order telling officials to follow the mail-voting rules, and officials who -- according to this same document -- are not following them. That's one page.…
…(cont) Then the other page. Same subject, different office. The system that's supposed to carry the actual ballots, the portal, the thing voters are supposed to trust with their name and their signature, the people running it are on record calling it untested. Not me calling it that. Them. In writing.
I keep coming back to that word because it's doing two jobs at once. It's an IT term, sure, software gets tested or it doesn't, that happens. But it's also, if you think about it, kind of a confession. You don't call something untested unless you know there was supposed to be a test.
So I've got a judge's order on one page and a phrase like 'untested' on another, both about the same stack of ballots, both from this same season. I'm not a lawyer. I just carry a notebook.
Oh -- one more thing, before you go. If the order says comply, and the portal itself is the thing they haven't tested, whose ballot is it, exactly, that's supposed to clear both hurdles this fall?
“They got a judge telling them flat out to follow the rules on mail ballots, and they're on record not doing it. Then in the same breath, their own portal, the actual thing carrying your ballot, they're calling it rushed and untested. That's not incompetence, that's an off-ramp built into the machine, and it lands on every envelope with your name on it this November.”
“Look, 'untested' is standard IT language, every rollout has some kinks, and nobody said noncompliance, they said review procedures are ongoing -- wait, did I just call an order 'ongoing review'? That's not what the order says. Let me get back to you.”
The receipts
A report detailed “grave concerns” that a new system being rushed into use by the U.S. Postal Service could imperil millions of mail ballots ahead of the midterm elections.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.