THE BLOCKADE BRIEF: September 2, 2026

THIS WEEK’S BLOCKADES

USPS Kept Building Trump’s Mail Ballot Purge System in Secret, Even After a Judge Ordered It Stopped

A whistleblower report filed with Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT)’s office reveals the Postal Service kept building Trump’s mail ballot verification system in secret, even after a federal judge ordered it stopped. Internal USPS meetings show officials raised the same disenfranchisement concerns the whistleblower later made public, warning that a single failed barcode scan in a bulk mailing could reject an entire batch of up to 10,000 ballots, and pushed the system forward anyway. Election officials across the country say they cannot comply in time, even if they wanted to: only 12 of 27 Republican state attorneys general agreed to defend Trump’s order in court, and the federal judge overseeing the case refused to lift her block.

Trump’s DHS Is Building a Nationwide Voter Surveillance Dragnet

While the mail ballot fight plays out, the Trump administration is racing to build the machinery to go after voters directly. Homeland Security has launched a “coordinated criminal voter fraud surge initiative,” redirecting agents normally assigned to trafficking and drug cases to hunt for voter fraud across nine states through mid-October. At the same time, ICE is paying up to $5 million to a contractor to comb through every state’s voter data, despite the fact that no national voter list has ever existed because elections are run at the state level. A new lawsuit calls the database itself illegal and says DHS has already admitted the underlying data will be riddled with inaccuracies. DOJ is separately requesting 1,000 election monitors this November, nearly 40 percent more than were deployed for the 2024 presidential election. And DHS Secretary Mullin refused to rule out sending ICE agents to polling places, leaving wide latitude for what counts as a “threat.”

ABHI RAHMAN, Try And Stop Us Chief Spokesperson:

“Donald Trump’s government got caught building a system to reject mail ballots in secret after a judge told them to stop, and in the same week they’re building a surveillance dragnet to track every voter in America and refusing to rule out sending ICE agents to polling places. None of this is about ‘voter fraud,’ because there isn’t any. It’s about scaring Americans out of voting because Trump and his MAGA Republicans know they can't win in November if everyone shows up.”