Our politics reporter Reid Epstein explains how the Trump administration is using the Postal Service to intervene in mail-in voting in state elections.
Page A2From§Eachthe noon edition — 11 September 2026
Postal Service asks Supreme Court to bless mail-voting changes its own whistleblower warned would derail the midterms
As it ran on the front
I read government filings for a living, so I want to be precise about what happened here, in order, because the order is the whole point.
On September 1st, an anonymous federal official inside the U.S. Postal Service filed a whistleblower disclosure with members of Congress. Sen. Richard Blumenthal released it in full, in a letter to Postmaster General David Steiner. The disclosure said the agency's rollout of President Trump's executive order on mail-in voting — the one directing federal lists of citizens and refusing delivery to anyone not on them — was "untested, fatally flawed," and could produce a "catastrophic failure" that would, in the whistleblower's words, "derail the midterm elections." That is not campaign rhetoric. That is an internal disclosure about the Postal Service's own operational readiness, filed by someone who works there.…
…(cont) The next day, September 2nd, Sen. Bernie Sanders read the same disclosure and called it part of an "authoritarian power grab." Fine, that's a senator being a senator.
Two days after the disclosure — September 3rd — the Justice Department, on behalf of the Postal Service, filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to clear the way for the agency to implement the exact executive order the whistleblower had just flagged. A lower court had blocked the Postal Service's implementation. The petition asks the Court to lift that block, in time for the midterms.
All together now — the sequence: disclosure warns the plan could break the election. Two days pass. The same agency asks the nation's highest court to let it run the plan anyway. The public timeline shows no amendment to the disclosure, no withdrawal of the warning, no answer to it at all. The Postal Service simply moved from "our own employee says this could fail catastrophically" to "please, Your Honors, let us proceed."
The New York Times has a piece out today walking through how the administration is using the Postal Service as a lever in state elections generally — worth reading if you want the wider frame. But the frame isn't the story. The story is two filings, two days apart, from one agency, on the same executive order.
I don't know how the Supreme Court rules. I know what's now sitting in the record: a disclosure dated September 1st, warning the plan could derail the midterms, and a petition dated September 3rd, asking to run the plan anyway.
“The guy who filed the warning and the guy who wrote the petition cash checks from the same building, and only one of them told the truth about what happens if this goes wrong. Two days, two filings, one agency — that's not a paperwork mix-up, that's an outfit ignoring its own inspector to hit a deadline. Except the deadline is the midterms, and the thing that breaks isn't a product, it's your ballot showing up.”
“"This is about giving Americans one uniform, secure way to vote by mail — a modern system, finally. The disclosure you're referencing is anonymous, unverified, filed by someone with, frankly, an agenda we can't get into. The Postal Service didn't ask the Supreme Court to bless anything, it asked the Court to lift a lower court's injunction so the agency could do its job — did I say 'the agency could do its job'? The whistleblower works for the agency too. Anyway, next question."”
The receipts
An anonymous federal whistleblower has warned that the Trump administration’s new system for handling mail ballots through the U.S. Postal Service is untested, fatally flawed and likely to lead to a “catastrophic failure” if it’s implemented ahead of November’s midterm elections.
· 'We Must Stop Trump’s Authoritarian Power Grab,' Sanders Says of Assault on Mail-In Voting from the morgue, 2 Sep 2026
· Postal Service Whistleblower Warns Trump Assault on Mail-In Voting Could ‘Derail the Midterm Elections’ from the morgue, 1 Sep 2026
· Postal Service asks Supreme Court to allow Trump’s mail voting changes from the morgue, 3 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.