If Donald Trump’s movement is defeated at the polls in November, Americans will owe thanks — at least in part — to a faceless person whose identity may remain a secret forever.
Sometime in the last few weeks, an anonymous employee of the United States Postal Service reached out to a small nonprofit called Whistleblower Aid. We can surmise how it went. Like many people who reach out to the watchdog group, the worried civil servant probably crafted a short message hinting at damning revelations but was careful not to put too much in writing. Then a lawyer got assigned to do an intake interview. In that first conversation, I suspect Whistleblower Aid staff were wide-eyed at the significance of what they were being told: the Trump administration was moving forward with an illegal plan to monitor the mail-in ballots of American citizens, against a judge’s orders, and in a way that could compromise the U.S. voting system.
That’s when the machine kicked into high gear. The lawyers would have worked quickly and quietly to prepare a formal whistleblower complaint documenting the explosive allegations. In the meantime, we know that they decided to put in place extraordinary security measures to protect the person’s identity. For good reason. In this administration, the punishment for telling the truth can be career-ending… or worse.
This week, that bombshell complaint landed in Congress. The disclosure, delivered to Senator Richard Blumenthal, alleges that the president’s team at the Postal Service has been quietly building a system that could deny huge numbers of Americans the ability to vote by mail in November, and that officials kept working on it even after federal courts ordered them to stop.
The details are shocking, even to election experts who suspected this might be the case. As part of Trump’s executive order restricting mail voting, the Postal Service has devised an Orwellian barcode tracking system, effectively allowing the president to track individual Americans’ mail-in ballots. Ostensibly the system is to allow federal authorities to identify and remove “noncitizen” voters from the mix. But according to the whistleblower, the system was so rushed and poorly designed that it will put the votes of ordinary American citizens at grave risk.
According to the disclosure, the system was designed in a way that might throw out hundreds or thousands of legitimate ballots at a time. Postal workers would scan a sample of a few hundred ballots out of batches of ten thousand or more, and if a single barcode fails to scan or match, the entire batch would get kicked back to state election officials to start over. The whistleblower’s attorneys call the process “entirely unforgiving,” warning it could trap ballots in repeated verification cycles and prevent states from mailing enormous numbers of them.
One third of Americans vote by mail. It doesn’t take a lot of complex math to realize what might happen if this kind of machinery seizes up weeks before an election. In fact, it almost doesn’t matter whether the disenfranchisement would be intentional or merely the product of staggering incompetence. Either way, it could upend the vote nationwide. What’s more, the whistleblower alleges the Postal Service defied court orders to keep building this flawed system, even after the Trump administration was told to halt all activity.
Last night, we spoke to the whistleblower’s attorney about the significance of these revelations. You can watch that conversation below.
But more than anything, I want to focus on the human being at the center of this. Over the past ten years, I’ve learned a thing or two about what he or she is probably experiencing right now. I’ve made the decision to blow the whistle on this president and, believe me, it’s not a cakewalk. I won’t forget the gut-sick nights wondering what would happen if it all went wrong or the moment I hit “send” and understood that there was no going back, even if it cost me my career, my future, or my life.
This person made the decision to sound the alarm against far stronger headwinds than I ever faced.
When I came forward, there were at least still guardrails in the system. This whistleblower emerged from the suffocating censorship of a government that has been systematically stripping away all of those protections. We’ve documented how Trump is moving to punish federal workers who expose illegal activity, gutting whistleblower safeguards for tens of thousands of employees after firing 17 inspectors general and decapitating the very office meant to shield truth-tellers. And we’ve written about Trump’s plan to bring a “catch and kill” system into the federal government, a proposed government-wide gag order that would bind two million civil servants to lifetime silence about what they witness on the job.
For the president, this crackdown is having the desired effect. According to a survey of federal employees, the share of government workers who feel they could report illegal activity without retaliation has collapsed — from 72 percent to 22 percent since Trump returned to power. That means a majority of federal workers went from feeling like they could tell the truth to feeling like they had a gun to their heads. In my entire career, I’ve never seen anything like it. The fear is palpable inside federal agencies.
Yet this person came forward anyway.
My reaction is twofold. First, we owe this individual the thanks of a grateful nation, even though we may never get the opportunity to say it. Anonymity is his or her right. While some of us ended up shedding ours and meeting the onslaught of retaliation, I don’t necessarily recommend it. Our system should protect anyone who makes disclosures about illegal activity and who wants to remain anonymous.
Second, their courage is exactly why the rest of us have a job to do. Whistleblowers won’t continue fighting corruption solely on their own volition and sense of patriotic duty. If the administration keeps intimidating them with gangster-like tactics, the intimidation will eventually snuff out even the bravest in government. Those would-be whistleblowers need to know that if they step forward, there will be support — lawyers, security, and institutions ready to catch them when they leap.
This is why DEFIANCE.org has partnered with Whistleblower Aid, which is representing this whistleblower… why we continue to support groups like Justice Connection, Democracy Defenders Fund, and so many others working on the front lines to protect people prepared to reveal illegal activity inside the Trump administration… and why we launched the real Anti-Weaponization Fund to defend truth-tellers against Trump’s revenge campaign. We’re doing this work for moments like this. If we really want to restore the rule of law in America, Donald Trump’s abuses of power must be exposed from the inside, and the people willing to do the exposing deserve an army at their back.
The disclosure is already doing its job. It’s giving fresh ammunition to the legal fight against Trump’s unconstitutional mail-voting order, which a federal judge has temporarily blocked and 23 states are challenging in court. And it makes it far more likely this scheme gets stopped before Election Day.
Somewhere out there in America, a public servant looked at a plan to sabotage your vote. Over their own self-doubt and the daunting consequences of self-sacrifice, he or she decided their oath to the Constitution mattered more than their own safety. That’s what saving a democracy actually looks like, friends. It’s rarely the famous people swinging their fists at the dictator. It’s almost always someone like this.
Wherever you are, patriot, let me just say on behalf of all of us: thank you.
Your friend, in defiance,
P.S. If you want to fight back, consider contributing to the Anti-Weaponization Fund. This month, we will be announcing new grants from the Fund to make sure more government whistleblowers are protected against Trump’s retaliation… and that people who come forward in defense of democracy have the support they deserve.
DEFIANCE DAILY
In case you missed it, last night’s episode of DEFIANCE Daily is below. Catch our next episode tomorrow night at 5 pm ET!
THE ANT HILL IS OUR MEMBERS-ONLY CORNER OF THE COLONY, WHERE “DEFY ANTS” GET MORE THAN JUST THE NEWSLETTER.
TODAY’S FEATURES: THE DEFIANCE WATCHLIST AND MY DEFIANCE MISSION
IF YOU’RE ALREADY A DEFIANCE MEMBER, THEN MARCH RIGHT IN. IF NOT, SIGN UP HERE, SO YOU DON’T MISS A THING.
