While the USPS rule is extremely bad, it’s not as bad as a whistleblower account might suggest. | Marcin Golba/NurPhoto via Getty ImagesOn 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, explainedThe 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 then be required to generate a unique barcode for each of these voters and put it on the envelope containing that voters’ ballot. The Postal Service will check ballots before they get to voters, scanning the envelope’s bar code to ensure that it’s going to the correct voter. If the ballot passes, it’ll go on to the voter. If it fails, it’ll get sent back to the election officials who mailed it for correction.All of that sounds reasonable in theory. But the devil is in the details, and the details suggest that this plan would be a huge mess if it were allowed to go into effect for the midterms.To make the new system work, envelopes need to be designed in a specific way that many local officials aren’t trained to do. The Postal Service system for generating scannable barcodes is really complicated — one experienced election official told me “my eyes glazed over” while attempting to navigate it. The federal database has not yet debuted, meaning that election officials have also had no training on it.And according to the whistleblower, the system is not just burdensome — it might not even work. The federal database that matches barcodes to voters is untested; “multiple USPS officials” describe it as a “shit show.” As a result, it is both extremely likely to generate errors and at risk of “catastrophic failure” on a technical level.Alarmingly, the system has been designed with what’s called a “zero percent failure rate” approach to ballot testing. The system will not scan each individual ballot; instead, it will scan samples of batches of ballots sent by state officials. Under the zero percent failure rate rule, if a single ballot fails the test, then the entire batch is sent back to state officials for reprocessing.Given the rushed nature of the software development, and how difficult compliance is for election offices, the odds of there being one ballot that gets flagged in each batch are likely pretty high. That’s a recipe for large numbers of voters being denied mail ballots for weeks — and potentially never even receiving them.At present, no local officials are using this system or even being trained on it. This is because a federal district judge has frozen the entire rule, concluding that it is unlawful for USPS to get this involved in regulating local elections.However, it appears that work is proceeding at USPS on developing the system. This, the whistleblower claims, is a direct violation of the court order.“After an initial pause of approximately one month, USPS leadership ordered employees to resume development of the election ballot mail IT system systems on or about a month ago, while the injunction was in effect,” the complaint alleges.The USPS rule may well never go into effectIt’s easy to look at this fact pattern and conclude that the Trump administration is illegally designing a system for stealing the election. But before we even get to the question of how bad the rule would be, we have to remember that it is currently blocked by the courts — and that block is likely to soon become permanent.Fears of USPS going rogue and implementing it in defiance of court orders are likely overblown for the simple reason that they are currently not doing that. According to Muller, the Notre Dame expert, it is not obviously illegal for the USPS to continue developing its system under current law. The most recent court stay, issued on August 27, holds that USPS must “take no further preparatory steps or implement in any way for elections occurring before or on November 3, 2026.” But building the IT infrastructure is not necessarily preparing it for the midterms; the government could plausibly argue that their work is geared towards implementation in future elections.“I am reluctant to ascribe [defiance], at least based on this record,” Muller says. “There is no question they hope to implement this in 2026, but there are ways to take steps to implement it for 2028 and maybe be able to implement it for 2026 if the injunction was lifted.”This matters a great deal. If USPS has gone fully rogue or lawless, it would mean they might simply implement this rule regardless of court orders. Since they’re clearly attempting to act within the letter of the law (if not its spirit), legal constraints appear operative — that we’re still somewhat within the realm of democracy and the rule of law, rather than dictatorial assertions of executive power to disrupt elections. The final word here will likely rest with the Supreme Court, who will almost certainly hear a case on the USPS rule before the elections.The Court’s first ruling on this matter was a kind of confusing mess. It overruled a lower court stay on purely procedural grounds, but did not actually allow the rule to go into effect or weigh in on the legal merits of the rule itself. By the time the winding route of appeals reaches the Supreme Court, and then the justices issue their order, we’d be pretty close to Election Day — close enough that the disruptions from allowing the Postal Service to go forward would be pretty immense.When you layer that on top of the quite strong statutory and constitutional arguments that this is outside USPS’s authority, legal experts think it’s likely that at least two of the court’s conservative justices would join the liberals in blocking the rule. But likely is not certain; the Court has certainly issued shockingly disruptive rulings in favor of Trump and his administration before.How bad would it be if the rule went through?Let’s say the Supreme Court does bless the new USPS rule. What would be the likely consequences?One theory is that Trump would basically be stealing the midterms. Democrats are more likely to vote by mail by Republicans, and this system would seemingly radically disrupt mail-in voting across the country — suggesting it would be an effective tool for rigging the elections in Trump’s favor.But while the USPS rule is extremely bad, it’s not as bad as this alarmist account might suggest.There is no doubt that the rule would be extraordinarily disruptive, especially in states like Oregon that vote almost entirely by mail. Tammy Patrick, one of the country’s leading experts on mail voting, has written that it would be “effectively impossible” for local officials to follow the rule’s procedures close to Election Day — noting that North Carolina, the first state to mail ballots, will have already sent them out on September 4, before the rule could possibly take effect.But the level of disruption to the midterms would depend a lot on specifics of timing and training we can’t predict, as well as the feasibility of possible alternatives. Local election offices could mail ballots using FedEx or UPS rather than USPS. If that pushed their already-tight budgets too far, state governments could provide emergency financial support and/or organize a surge in election volunteers to stand up new in-person polling stations.Moreover, we don’t know what the effect on the partisan lean of the elections would be.The mere fact that Democrats vote more by mail than Republicans doesn’t mean that Democrats would be more likely to be affected by this rule than Republicans. Currently, Democrats tend to win voters who are highly engaged and informed — the kind of voters who, if voting by mail becomes too difficult, would wait in line to vote in person. Republicans, by contrast, increasingly rely on low-propensity voters who are more likely to give up if they can’t vote in the most convenient possible manner.“This is kind of a flawed political strategy wrapped in a rather vocally charged policy from the president,” Ben Ginsberg, a longtime GOP election attorney, told CNN. “Republican operatives in the states know that putting up those barriers to that part of the Republican base makes Republican turnout less likely.”None of this is to downplay the risks of the USPS rule. There are plenty of worst-case scenarios in which this causes massive disruptions to elections, including in critical states, that majorly slow down ballot delivery or effectively disenfranchise thousands of voters. And even the best-case scenarios would be extremely expensive and time consuming, likely having all sorts of negative consequences we can’t even predict.But to say that it would be tantamount to canceling the midterms or handing it to Republicans, as some have, is getting well beyond what current evidence suggests.So we have to right-size our concerns here.There is an entirely plausible world in which the Supreme Court green-lights the USPS rule and, as a consequence, the midterms are plagued by implementation difficulties that effectively disenfranchise a significant number of Americans. This would be seriously damaging to American democracy, to put it mildly, but there are also good reasons to envision a happier ending: that the Court won’t approve the rule, and that its consequences might be mitigated even if they do.The correct attitude is thus neither complacency nor dooming. Americans should prepare for significant disruption to our voting system, to begin contingency planning in the event that things go wrong. They should do so with the belief that the voters, and not USPS or Trump or even the Supreme Court, are the ultimate actors in a democracy.