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

While the USPS rule is extremely bad, it’s not as bad as a whistleblower account might suggest. | Marcin Golba/NurPhoto via Getty Images 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.