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How freaked out should you be about Trump’s plot to disrupt mail voting?

There’s a very serious threat here. But it’s not as bad as some recent news might suggest.

On Tuesday, Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s office published an alarming report from an anonymous whistleblower about the USPS’s role in the 2026 midterms. The report suggests the US Postal Service is rushing to implement a ballot-vetting system for the midterms that was inadequate and all but certain to reject large numbers of legitimate ballots. Moreover, the whistleblower alleged, they were doing this in violation of an explicit court order.

The immediate reaction from Democrats was shock. And indeed, if the whistleblower’s claims of court defiance were true, it would suggest the Trump administration was both attempting to sabotage the midterm elections and rejecting the authority of courts to stop them — basically, entering true dictator territory where law holds no meaning and the president feels free to blatantly rig elections.

But it is likely not true.

In reporting this piece, I spoke to several leading experts on election law and administration., not one of whom was sympathetic to Trump’s approach to voting by mail. None suggested that we had entered the realm of complete disregard of court orders, or that Trump appeared poised to implement this system in defiance of the Supreme Court if it rules against it.

“This is not a clearcut case to me of defiance,” Rick Hasen, an election law expert at UCLA, said.

This is not to say that there’s nothing to worry about. There’s consensus among experts, both the ones I spoke with and the community in general, that the proposed USPS system would be extraordinarily burdensome to implement, in ways that could potentially compromise the fairness of the midterm elections. The whistleblower’s report is especially alarming on the details of this system, suggesting it’s even worse than many feared.

So if the Supreme Court overrules lower court stays, and allows the new rule to go forward, it would in all likelihood be a very serious problem in November.

But the Court’s conservative majority — or, more specifically, the more moderate of the right-wing judges — are the key X factor here, rather than a lawless Trump. And while the Court majority can be willing to bend over backward for Trump, there is at least good reason to think they won’t do so here.

“The Court has repeatedly said we’re worried about intruding on how states run their elections,” said Derek Muller, a professor at Notre Dame Law School.

The USPS rule, and the whistleblower allegations, explained

The new USPS rule for mail-in ballots was derived from a Trump executive order in March, but only formally finalized at the end of August. It radically expands the role of the Postal Service in US elections, taking it from a simple vehicle for distributing ballots to an oversight vehicle for assessing whether states are allowing unlawful ballots to go through.

Under the rule, state and local officials will be required to upload information from each mail voter’s name and address to a federal database. They will........

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