Nevada’s high elections official said he believes the Trump administration intends “to disenfranchise and discourage voters” as the U.S. Postal Service strikes ahead on setting up a new system for delivering mail ballots that a whistleblower reportedly said could lead to tens of 1000’s of ballots failing to attain voters before the November midterms.
In March, President Donald Trump (R) issued an govt order searching for federal control over mail voting, an effort Nevada, where almost half of the voters used mail ballots in 2024, and more than two dozen other states are now suing to stop. A federal choose sided with the states and briefly halted the new mail poll guidelines earlier this week, but the administration has appealed her resolution, and the U.S. Supreme Court will seemingly have to weigh in.
The Postal Service has begun placing Trump’s adjustments into place, but Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar (D) instructed The Nevada Independent in an interview that he has little religion in the federal authorities’s potential to implement the new guidelines, which require states to submit lists of eligible mail voters and require the postal company to cross-check against those lists before it delivers any mail ballots.
“To ask the federal government to implement a major database is a lot of work,” Aguilar said. “And we know the federal government does nothing well.”
A new whistleblower assertion launched Tuesday by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) alleges that the postal company has been scrambling behind the scenes to construct a new pc system in a matter of months, which will be used to decide if the company will ship mail ballots issued by state election officers. The report on the warnings from the unidentified whistleblower — described as an nameless federal official with direct data of the Postal Service — contends the Postal Service is “intent on moving forward with its flawed plans, no matter the chaos they create.”
The new mail poll system could be particularly destabilizing for Nevada, one of just eight states that ship mail ballots to all registered voters and where 47 p.c of votes were forged by mail in the 2024 basic election.
Mail voting is particularly in style in many of Nevada’s rural counties, which lean Republican, although more Democrats than Republicans voted by mail statewide in 2022 and 2024.
Blumenthal’s report contends that, due to the new procedures, a single scanning error in a batch of tens of 1000’s of poll envelopes could forestall any from reaching voters.
State election officers have warned that it’s unrealistic to set up the new system before the first mail ballots nationwide — North Carolina’s — start going out Friday. Nevada must start sending mail ballots to out-of-state voters no later than 45 days before Election Day, or Sept. 18 this 12 months.
“The fact that they’re going to do this in this time frame is concerning, because accuracy is key to all this,” said Aguilar. “When you’re discussing a fundamental right granted in the Constitution, there is a high threshold that you must meet.”
He also said that the Trump administration’s strolling back of its claims, made earlier this month, that it had found 16,000 noncitizens on Nevada’s voter rolls was further proof that the company was deliberately being careless to make voters trust the system less.
White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis instructed The Associated Press in a assertion on Tuesday that the software program buildout course of is “neither complex nor unique” for the Postal Service because it already makes use of bulk mailing and clever mail barcodes for massive clients.
Gov. Joe Lombardo’s (R) spokesperson, Drew Galang, wrote in a assertion that the governor has “long maintained that states have authority over elections, and he will continue to support measures at the state level that strengthen the integrity of Nevada’s voting process and instill confidence in our elections.”
Galang did not handle particular questions about whether the governor has issues about the president’s govt order on mail ballots or supports the Postal Service’s alleged plan to not ship out whole batches of mail-in ballots if just one poll fails verification.
Lombardo said at a March IndyTalks occasion that Nevada “does a pretty good job” on election integrity but also said that some people still mistrust the system, which he attributed to insurance policies such as post-Election Day poll counting, voting by mail without ID necessities (Nevada law requires a signature to match a voter’s file) and permitting people who are not associated to a voter to flip in their poll.
The governor has backed a voter ID poll query that will return to voters this 12 months after overwhelmingly passing in 2024.
John Sadler, communications director for Attorney General Aaron Ford’s (D) workplace, wrote in a assertion, “We are aware of the alleged situation and will take any and all necessary steps to ensure Nevada’s elections are protected.”
As midterms close to, legal battle waged over Trump’s order
Trump’s govt order directed U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the commissioner of the Social Security Administration to develop state citizenship lists and then required the Postal Service to ship mail ballots only to voters who are on such a listing. Ballot envelopes would have to comply with new Postal Service guidelines and embody bar codes.
The online portal that is the subject of the whistleblower grievance is supposed for states to ship their lists of verified voters to the Postal Service.
It’s unclear if, or how, the Postal Service’s new requirement could have an effect on Nevada’s 383,000 “inactive” voters, who do not obtain mail ballots mechanically but can still vote by mail if they replace their handle before an election. The federal rule codifying the new method asserts that states are allowed to edit their voter lists all through election season and that “the Postal Service does not expect these initial lists to be complete or final.”
The White House has called the mail voting provisions “commonsense measures” vital to fight fraud, and the federal rule states that its function is to “facilitate—not constrain—voters’ ability to access mail-in or absentee voting.”
In an interview, Aguilar said his workplace had also begun to look into how it could companion with non-public firms — such as FedEx and UPS — to ship mail ballots, given his doubts that the Postal Service will be a dependable companion in the coming months. “We’re crisis managers,” he said. “We have to think outside the box.”
Trump has long opposed voting by mail, even though he has repeatedly used the methodology to forged his own poll. He falsely blamed mail voting for his 2020 election loss and has spent years spreading conspiracy theories about it. A report by the Brookings Institution revealed in 2025 discovered that mail voting fraud occurred in only about 4 circumstances out of every 10 million mail ballots forged.
Since returning to workplace, Trump has said Republicans should be “taking over” vote counting in Democratic areas and launched a sweeping attempt to reinvestigate the 2020 election, despite a mountain of evidence that he lost pretty to former President Joe Biden (D).
Until Trump came out against mail voting in 2020, the system was used equally by both events. Since then, it has become more common nationwide among Democratic voters.
After Trump issued his govt order, Democratic attorneys basic in 26 states — including Ford in Nevada — and civil rights teams sued and ultimately won a ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani in Boston barring implementation of the system before the November midterms. But without ruling on the legality of Trump’s order, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority last week discovered that was untimely and overruled Talwani, momentarily clearing the means for its implementation.
On the night time of Aug. 21, the Postal Service launched a ultimate rule outlining how it would implement the order.
It said it would only ship mail ballots for states that got approval for the design of their envelopes and submitted a listing of voters receiving them through the still-not-active online portal. That rule gave plaintiffs a probability to sue again, and Talwani on Thursday night time issued a 14-day restraining order against implementation of the measure.
Whistleblower grievance says portal development is rushed and sloppy
The letter from Blumenthal and an accompanying abstract of the whistleblower’s statements says the Postal Service started work on the portal June 15 and stopped June 25 after Talwani’s initial order. Then, on July 29, the Postal Service restarted the work. That was when the administration appealed the choose’s order to the Supreme Court. The high court did not strike Talwani’s injunction down until Aug. 24.
Talwani last week discovered the Postal Service violated her order by persevering with to work on the ultimate rule, but she imposed no sanctions on the authorities. On Monday, she issued a ruling where she refused to raise the restraining order but also discovered that the Postal Service could proceed working on its portal as long as it did not power states to use it.
Sadler, the spokesperson for Attorney General Ford, famous in a assertion that “there are significant consequences for violating a court order,” citing the potential for personal sanctions for authorities officers who do so, although he did not state whether the attorney basic believed a court order had been violated.
The whistleblower’s report also says the Postal Service is implementing a “zero percent” rule in which any errors in any mail ballots despatched out by an election workplace could lead to all of them being discarded — even if it’s merely one drawback amid tens of 1000’s of respectable ballots.
The rule requires ballots to be dealt with in a bodily post workplace by an election official. Those will then be scanned to guarantee they match the voter database. During three layers of checks, a single obvious error could cause the entire batch to be rejected, the assertion says.
Blumenthal said he has “a very strong hope and some faith that our system of justice will strike down this unconstitutional and unconscionable rule.” But, he added, if it one way or the other goes into impact for the midterms, he would not advise voting by mail.
Eric Neugeboren contributed maps to this story.
The Associated Press writers Nicholas Riccardi and Lindsay Whitehurst contributed to this story.