1. United States
2. Ohio
3. Letter

Mail voting for the midterms officially starts this week. This morning, a Senator released a whistleblower report from a USPS official with knowledge of the agency’s plan to carry out Trump’s executive order on mail-in ballots. In case you missed our show on that executive order last week, here’s some quick background. In March, Trump ordered the USPS to impose his preferred restrictions on mail voting. For ballots to go out, states would have to submit voter information to a federal portal and print a high-security barcode on the envelope, among other restrictions. Last week, a federal judge in Boston blocked key parts of that plan, finding the Postal Service has no authority to control voting by mail. The administration is appealing, and the whole thing will probably land at the Supreme Court. But according to the whistleblower, despite the court’s freeze, the USPS kept drafting their plan anyway, hoping to have some parts ready by September 1st. That’s today. According to the whistleblower, the compressed timeline resulted in pure chaos: insufficient testing, shifting goals, and sloppy mistakes. In the final stretch, multiple officials described the project with a two-word phrase I can’t say on this show. So what are the consequences if this rush job makes it through the courts? The most important point is the new system’s zero tolerance policy. If one ballot doesn’t pass verification, the whole batch goes back. The whistleblower says that could delay ballots by the thousands and keep states from mailing even more. The report says that “catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug.” The Senator who released the report called it “a system that is intended to fail.” I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: if Trump really thought voting by mail was insecure, he wouldn’t trust the USPS with his own ballot. But he does. That’s because this isn’t about the handful of fraudulent ballots among the tens of millions cast every cycle. It’s about the millions of Democrats that vote by mail. They want to suppress Democratic votes, and if that fails they’ll settle for injecting as much chaos as they can into the process. We saw the same thing with redistricting. This administration will reach for any dirty trick in the book to cling to its majorities, and they’ll do it fast. Because apparently we need these security measures ASAP. But the Iran war? The cost of living? No rush there. Where you find that sense of urgency tells you a lot about what this President truly cares about. It’s not our troops abroad, and it’s certainly not your wallet. All he cares about is him and his buddies staying in power.