Nevada elections chief blasts Trump admin as "careless" as it enacts new mail voting rules

Nevada's top elections official said he believes the Trump administration intends "to disenfranchise and discourage voters" as the U.S. Postal Service moves forward on setting up a new system for delivering mail ballots that a whistleblower reportedly said could lead to tens of thousands of ballots failing to reach voters before the November midterms.

In March, President Donald Trump (R) issued an executive order seeking federal control over mail voting, an effort Nevada, where nearly half of the voters used mail ballots in 2024, and more than two dozen other states are now suing to stop. A federal judge sided with the states and temporarily halted the new mail ballot rules earlier this week, but the administration has appealed her decision, and the U.S. Supreme Court will likely have to weigh in.

The Postal Service has begun putting Trump's changes into place, but Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar (D) told The Nevada Independent in an interview that he has little faith in the federal government's ability to implement the new rules, which require states to submit lists of eligible mail voters and require the postal agency 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 statement released Tuesday by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) alleges that the postal agency has been scrambling behind the scenes to build a new computer system in a matter of months, which will be used to determine if the agency will deliver mail ballots issued by state election officials. The report on the warnings from the unidentified whistleblower — described as an anonymous federal official with direct knowledge 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 ballot system could be especially destabilizing for Nevada, one of just eight states that send mail ballots to all registered voters and where 47 percent of votes were cast by mail in the 2024 general election. 

Mail voting is especially popular 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 thousands of ballot envelopes could prevent any from reaching voters. 

State election officials have warned that it's unrealistic to set up the new system before the first mail ballots nationwide — North Carolina's — begin going out Friday. Nevada must begin sending mail ballots to out-of-state voters no later than 45 days before Election Day, or Sept. 18 this year. 

"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 walking back of its claims, made earlier this month, that it had discovered 16,000 noncitizens on Nevada's voter rolls was further proof that the agency was intentionally being careless to make voters trust the system less. 

White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis told The Associated Press in a statement on Tuesday that the software buildout process is "neither complex nor unique" for the Postal Service because it already uses bulk mailing and intelligent mail barcodes for large customers.

Gov. Joe Lombardo's (R) spokesperson, Drew Galang, wrote in a statement 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 address specific questions about whether the governor has concerns about the president's executive order on mail ballots or supports the Postal Service's alleged plan to not send out entire batches of mail-in ballots if just one ballot fails verification.

Lombardo said at a March IndyTalks event that Nevada "does a pretty good job" on election integrity but also said that some people still distrust the system, which he attributed to policies such as post-Election Day ballot counting, voting by mail without ID requirements (Nevada law requires a signature to match a voter's file) and allowing people who are not related to a voter to turn in their ballot.

The governor has backed a voter ID ballot question that will return to voters this year after overwhelmingly passing in 2024.

John Sadler, communications director for Attorney General Aaron Ford's (D) office, wrote in a statement, "We are aware of the alleged situation and will take any and all necessary steps to ensure Nevada's elections are protected."

As midterms near, legal battle waged over Trump's order 

Trump's executive 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 send mail ballots only to voters who are on such a list. Ballot envelopes would have to comply with new Postal Service rules and include bar codes.

The online portal that is the subject of the whistleblower complaint is intended for states to deliver their lists of verified voters to the Postal Service.

It's unclear if, or how, the Postal Service's new requirement could affect Nevada's 383,000 "inactive" voters, who do not receive mail ballots automatically but can still vote by mail if they update their address before an election. The federal rule codifying the new approach asserts that states are allowed to edit their voter lists throughout 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" necessary to combat fraud, and the federal rule states that its purpose is to "facilitate—not constrain—voters' ability to access mail-in or absentee voting." 

In an interview, Aguilar said his office had also begun to look into how it could partner with private companies — such as FedEx and UPS — to deliver mail ballots, given his doubts that the Postal Service will be a reliable partner 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 method to cast his own ballot. 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 published in 2025 found that mail voting fraud occurred in only about four cases out of every 10 million mail ballots cast.

Since returning to office, 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 fairly to former President Joe Biden (D). 

Until Trump came out against mail voting in 2020, the system was used equally by both parties. Since then, it has become more common nationwide among Democratic voters. 

After Trump issued his executive order, Democratic attorneys general in 26 states — including Ford in Nevada — and civil rights groups sued and eventually 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 found that was premature and overruled Talwani, momentarily clearing the way for its implementation.

On the night of Aug. 21, the Postal Service released a final rule outlining how it would implement the order.

It said it would only send mail ballots for states that got approval for the design of their envelopes and submitted a list of voters receiving them through the still-not-active online portal. That rule gave plaintiffs a chance to sue again, and Talwani on Thursday night issued a 14-day restraining order against implementation of the measure.

Whistleblower complaint says portal development is rushed and sloppy

The letter from Blumenthal and an accompanying summary of the whistleblower's statements says the Postal Service began 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 judge's order to the Supreme Court. The high court did not strike Talwani's injunction down until Aug. 24.

Talwani last week found the Postal Service violated her order by continuing to work on the final rule, but she imposed no sanctions on the government. On Monday, she issued a ruling where she refused to lift the restraining order but also found that the Postal Service could continue working on its portal as long as it did not force states to use it.

Sadler, the spokesperson for Attorney General Ford, noted in a statement that "there are significant consequences for violating a court order," citing the potential for personal sanctions for government officials who do so, although he did not state whether the attorney general 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 sent out by an election office could lead to all of them being discarded — even if it's simply one problem amid tens of thousands of legitimate ballots.

The rule requires ballots to be handled in a physical post office by an election official. Those will then be scanned to ensure they match the voter database. During three layers of checks, a single apparent error could cause the whole batch to be rejected, the statement 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 somehow goes into effect for the midterms, he would not advise voting by mail.

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Eric Neugeboren contributed maps to this story.

The Associated Press writers Nicholas Riccardi and Lindsay Whitehurst contributed to this story.