Yesterday we learned that the U.S. Postal Service has been secretly building a new "Federal Ballot Mail Portal" to review state requests to transmit mail-in ballots to voters. According to a recent USPS rule that has been temporarily blocked by a federal court, before the Postal Service will deliver a mail-in ballot to a voter, it must compare the name on the envelope with a list submitted by state election officials.

According to the whistleblower, the build-out of this system has been "sloppy and rushed." They point to the fact that the new system has "a zero-percent failure policy." The result, according to them, is that entire batches of ballot requests will be rejected if any single one of them contains an error.

Here is how they explain it in the complaint: "As presently designed, if even one bar code on one single ballot in a bulk-mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to properly scan during the verification process, the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the state — effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed to voters."

The whistleblower views this as a serious flaw in the system. "Even under ordinary circumstances this would be problematic," they point out, "because of predictable errors in any barcode scanning process."

And of course, because this entire system has been rushed and subject to court orders halting work, these are not "ordinary circumstances."

What the whistleblower and others see as a serious flaw in the system is — I am virtually certain — viewed by the White House as one of its primary virtues. Donald Trump wants to cripple mail-in voting. Short of that, he wants to weaponize access to it and ballot rejections to suit his partisan political interests.

He is not interested in a system that might only reject a ballot at random. He wants to ensure that disenfranchisement can occur at scale with partisan consequences.

That is the system that the Postal Service appears to have built.

As to scale, it is obvious that the zero-percent failure policy allows the Postal Service to use the pretext of one bad name to disenfranchise thousands at a time. That is why the whistleblower worries that "millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all."

One of the most obvious ways this can be weaponized to target Democratic voters is by the USPS deciding how many names go into a single batch. For example, a rule that requires all ballots in a single ZIP code to be batched together would disproportionately impact Democrats because they tend to live in higher-density areas than Republicans.

On top of that, consider what the most likely sources of discrepancies might be. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who released the whistleblower complaint, noted that "someone [who] has recently changed their name after marriage or moved" would be a potential trigger for these so-called "errors." If targeting married women and more transient voters sounds familiar, it is because these same populations were targeted for disenfranchisement by the SAVE Act.

Then there is the simple fact that more Democrats vote by mail. So even without any specific targeting, the widespread disallowance of mail-in ballots would have a direct partisan effect on the election.

Donald Trump has known that mail-in voting hurts Republicans ever since he started lying about it in advance of the 2020 election. In May of that year, he posted that mail-in voting will "lead to the end of our Great Republican Party." And he has been at it ever since.

He has been lying about the risks of fraud in the mail-in voting system just as long. In July 2020, he tweeted, "Mail-In Ballots will lead to massive electoral fraud and a rigged 2020 Election."

By 2025, the only thing that had changed was his preferred social media platform and his odd use of all caps: "ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING, and everybody, IN PARTICULAR THE DEMOCRATS, KNOWS THIS."

None of this is to suggest that Trump is a smart man or a political genius. He isn't. But one of his greatest assets is his ability to have his cronies and sycophants execute his wishes without his needing to be involved in — or even understand — the details.

We have seen this with criminal prosecutions at the Department of Justice and statements by the chair of the FCC. Those seeking to gain access and favor execute his wishes without the need for explicit, detailed guidance.

In my view, that is the most likely explanation for the design of the USPS portal. It may be sloppy. It may be chaotic. But it is designed to achieve what Trump wants.