Even as Donald Trump regularly uses mail-in ballots himself, he has decided that mail-in ballots are a system by which voting fraud occurs. To be quite clear, this is bullshit. There is astoundingly little evidence of significant voter fraud, and that’s equally true between in-person and voting-by-mail. And there’s zero evidence that mail-in voter fraud has ever even come close to swinging a federal election. Indeed, what little voter fraud there is often involves mixups of people who thought they were eligible to vote accidentally trying to vote when they were ineligible.

Either way, a few years back, Trump started blaming mail-in ballots for the completely mythological “rigged elections” he keeps insisting are happening, and of course the MAGA establishment quickly fell into line. We just recently wrote about how the Fifth Circuit appeals court has been working overtime to pretend that it’s well-established that mail-in ballots are insecure. But the bigger issue is that earlier this year, Trump issued an executive order to try to limit the use of mail-in ballots.

Specifically, the executive order tells the US Postal Service to engage in a “rulemaking” that is designed to make it much more difficult for states to offer mail-in ballots. And, on top of that, it demands that states that offer mail-in ballots must hand over their voter rolls to the federal government. The White House has been demanding voter rolls from a bunch of states, and so far every state that has engaged in litigation over this issue has won (it’s now over 20 cases, all of which have gone against the administration).

On its face, the executive order should be seen as pure nonsense, given that the states get to run elections, not the federal government. And even if it were the federal government, that’s not what executive orders are for. But given that the same Supreme Court that insisted no Democratic president could do literally anything without explicit congressional approval now treats Donald Trump as the very special birthday boy who gets whatever he asks for, we have to take even his most ridiculous demands seriously.

A district court judge, Indira Talwani, who is overseeing two of the cases challenging that executive order has issued injunctions in both cases, blocking the US government from putting it into effect. As Talwani notes, the states get to determine how their elections are run, per the Constitution.

Article I of the Constitution also empowers the States to prescribe the “Times, Places, and Manner of holding” congressional elections. U.S. CONST. art. I, § 4, cl. 1. “[T]hese comprehensive words embrace authority to provide a complete code for congressional elections, not only as to times and places, but in relation to notices, registration, supervision of voting, protection of voters, prevention of fraud and corrupt practices, counting of votes” among other issues. Smiley v. Holm, 285 U.S. 355, 366 (1932).

The President is elected by vote of the Electoral College. See U.S. CONST. amend. XII. The Electors Clause empowers each State to appoint electors to the Electoral College “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” U.S. CONST. art. II, § 1, cl. 2. The States require their electors be appointed by popular vote of qualified voters. See Chiafalo v. Washington, 591 U.S. 578, 584 (2020). Accordingly, the States alone determine voter-eligibility requirements, subject only to the outer limits of the Constitution. See, e.g., U.S. CONST. amend. XIX (“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged . . . on account of sex.”); U.S. CONST. amend. XXVI (“The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote, shall not be denied or abridged . . . on account of age.”). For presidential elections, the Electors Clause gives States the primary authority to decide how electors are chosen.

As a result, the court ordered (among other things) the USPS to not take any steps to implement the executive order.

Furthermore, in the latter injunction, Talwani pointed out that the federal government failed to present literally any evidence of mail-in voting fraud:

The record is devoid of any declarations or other proffered evidence to suggest that mailin voting has resulted in voting by non-citizens.

In other words — the DOJ, despite the president insisting that non-citizen voting was happening all the time with mail-in ballots — didn’t even try to present evidence of that to the judge.

But this week, a USPS whistleblower revealed that the Postal Service has been building the machinery to implement the order anyway — issuing a final rule on August 26 and, per the disclosure, restarting development around July 29 even though the very clear injunction against doing anything was still in force. The whistleblower went to Senator Richard Blumenthal who released the whistleblower’s report, along with a letter to the Postmaster General demanding an explanation.

My office is in receipt of an alarming whistleblower disclosure (the “Disclosure”) outlining the United States Postal Service’s (“USPS”) perilously rushed and potentially unlawful implementation of President Trump’s Executive Order seeking to restrict mail-in voting. The whistleblower’s allegations make clear that USPS lacks the technical or operational capability needed to effectively implement the EO’s provisions in a way that safeguards every citizen’s right to vote in the upcoming midterm elections. Despite this, the Trump Administration appears intent on USPS moving forward with its flawed plans, no matter the chaos they may create. The whistleblower’s allegations also provide disturbing information suggesting that USPS may have violated a court order by continuing to implement the EO despite being ordered to cease all such work. We urge you to abandon this ill-conceived, unconscionable plan and ensure that all Americans can exercise their constitutional right to vote, including by mail, without interference by USPS.

The USPS’s defiance of the court order here is pretty direct. The judge issued an injunction on Section 3 of the executive order on June 25th. USPS did, in fact, stop work on the portal, while the DOJ appealed. On July 25th, the appeals court upheld the injunction, noting that the executive order “directs unprecedented levels of involvement by federal officials in how states administer elections.”

But just four days later, on July 29th, the whistleblower says that USPS leadership told the IT team to start building a tool to enforce the executive order, in direct and obvious defiance of the injunction against it. Then on August 11th, the district court expanded the injunction, which should have made it even clearer to USPS to stop. But USPS appears to have completely ignored that. While the Supreme Court put a stay on the injunction on August 24th, two days later the district court issued a temporary restraining order. But it appears that basically none of that mattered, as USPS leadership had the IT team continue to work on the thing they were explicitly barred by multiple courts to do.

As Blumenthal’s letter summarizes, the USPS rushed to build a portal whose main job appeared to be to block the mailing of mail-in ballots to voters (i.e., this is not them swiping already completed ballots, just refusing to send them to voters in the first place). And because USPS is now run by people whose main qualification is loyalty to Donald Trump, the execution is exactly as incompetent and slapdash as you’d expect:

The whistleblower’s Disclosure describes an unprecedented process that allows USPS to decide whether ballots issued by state election officials should be mailed. To do so, USPS is building an entirely new online system, the USPS Federal Ballot Mail Portal and related IT systems (the “Portal”), which will be used to screen ballots submitted by state election officials prior to USPS agreeing to mail them to voters. The Disclosure identifies problems at every stage of USPS’s development of the Portal, demonstrating deeply flawed plans for implementation. According to the whistleblower, USPS’s effort to develop and deploy the Portal has been “rushed,” “risky and haphazard” because leadership has demanded an impossible timeframe. In an effort to meet impossible deadlines, USPS has eliminated standard and needed testing, thereby creating substantial risk of a “catastrophic failure” of the system that could “derail the midterm elections.”

What could possibly go wrong:

USPS began work building the Portal on or around June 15, 2026 just three months before the date USPS planned to launch the system and just five months before the November 2026 midterm elections. On or about June 25, 2026, USPS ordered work on the Portal to cease due to a court order enjoining implementation of the EO. That work stoppage persisted for approximately a month, further reducing the time that USPS had to build the new system. According to the whistleblower, building the information technology infrastructure necessary to complete the Portal could take a year or more. Yet, USPS leadership demanded that the Portal be completed for a launch date of September 1, 2026, less than six months after the EO was issued. As a result of this rushed process, USPS has been unable to conduct tests of the Portal to ensure its proper functioning, troubleshoot problems, or distribute instructions on use to state election officials. According to the whistleblower, the Portal “violates standard principles of testing and debugging new software before launch.” Normal procedures at USPS for such systems include internal testing, customer acceptance testing, and a final development stage before release to public facing users. The Portal has gone through none of these basic checks.

Going beyond just Blumenthal’s summary, the actual whistleblower report has some astounding details about how the bosses at USPS working on this seem to have no clue how to build reliable software (one wonders if they’re ex-DOGE folks):

Throughout the development of the project, those giving guidance to tech developers lacked understanding of project parameters. Different team members continued to have different understandings of how the system is supposed to function which caused ongoing and greater confusion among the group.

While there continued to be no clear written requirements for the software and IT system, those developing the new election ballot mail IT system were placed in the position of trying to glean requirements from opaque comments at meetings. It continued to be clear that those giving directions did not understand exactly what was to be built. There was a growing concern that many were grasping at straws, trying to do their best to decipher cryptic instructions, and likely missing important details. Elements as basic to the project as whether a validation issue was a “warning” or an “error” continued to be unclear as leadership provided inaccurate information about these issues. To clarify, a warning allows a ballot to continue through the process while an error stops it. These occurrences reinforced the need for written requirements and the ongoing failures in communication.

Even so, the team was told that the system had to be ready to launch… by yesterday. They were given less than a month to figure it out. If you know anything about software development, project management, or… just about how anything works, these paragraphs are concerning:

Around this time at least one senior USPS official seemed to up the stakes by becoming a more active voice pushing for project completion on the new deadline. For example, when IT workers expressed concerns about the quality of the product under USPS leadership’s compressed timeline, the senior official stated that they (the official) “were not trying to stop anyone from getting their ballots and what is the problem?” Employees went on to reiterate concerns that many teams were still missing details of how systems were supposed to work and that written requirements could ensure that everyone was on the same page. The senior official was dismissive of these concerns. The conversation continued with others repeating the need for clear requirements; while leadership insisted that it was easy to understand what was needed and also that there was no time to write down the requirements. The contradiction was obvious that it should not take a great deal of time to write down something that is easily understood.

Concern continued to grow and the Whistleblower became aware that IT teams referred to the largely oral requirements as a “moving target.”

By the third week in August “user stories” – short, plain-language descriptions of a software feature written from the perspective of an end-user (focused on what a user wants to achieve and why) – were described as unusable “garbage”. User stories that had been generated had incorrect information and needed to be updated.

Throughout this project, the Whistleblower understood that IT teams were siloed and not communicating with one another. Teams had so little understanding what other teams were working on such that when elements were brought together, the teams were unaware of various developments, creating more work to utilize even the completed portions of the work.

By August 20, there was a massive rush as teams tried to get “everything committed” – in order to meet the goal of getting the ballot mail systems ready for customer testing on August 24. The resulting chaos caused work to be overwritten. By this point IT workers were resigned that even if they could get the portal put together and working in the internal development environment, there would not be enough time to test and fix any issue that would inevitably arise in customer testing.

The system was designated a grand total of four (FOUR!) days of user testing (and it’s not even clear if the testing actually happened):

By August 24 the expectation was that if somehow everything was accomplished on Monday the 24th, the code would end up in internal testing on Tuesday, August 25, then move to customer testing on Wednesday, August 26 allowing only four work days to test. For a system that manages something as important as handling voting and ballots, 4 days of user testing is entirely unreasonable. Only leadership seemed to express hope that the September 1 deadline was viable. If a problem was found during testing, which was almost certain, the IT workers would need to fix it and that fix would need to move back to internal testing and then into customer testing again. If a problem wasn’t found in the first 2 days, the fix could not make it back to the customer testing environment in time to meet the deadline.

In just the week prior to September 1, 2026, the Whistleblower learned that IT workers have described the election ballot mail development process as “a shit show.”

Very confidence building!

The whistleblower notes that a similar internal tech project that the USPS IT team built in the past “set aside 47 working days for testing.” And this one gets four.

Perhaps an even bigger problem than the slapdash hand-wavey “build a complex system in weeks with no written requirements, and no time for testing,” was the demand for a “zero percent failure rate.” That means that if a single barcode won’t scan — whether because of bad connectivity or a voter got married and changed their name — USPS bounces the entire batch back to the state. And these batches can run to tens of thousands of ballots. Back to Blumenthal’s summary:

Not only is this system astonishingly untested, USPS has simultaneously implemented an impracticable zero percent failure rate. When ballots are submitted to USPS in large-volume batches, if any one ballot in the batch cannot be verified against the Portal, all ballots in that batch will be rejected. For example, if a state election official brings a batch of 10,000 ballots to USPS and USPS is unable to match just one of those ballots against the Portal – because, for example, someone has recently changed their name after marriage or they’ve moved – then USPS would refuse to mail the remaining 9,999 ballots as well. As the whistleblower notes, “USPS expects the state to take back the entire batch to cure the issue with the single ballot…” Should the slapdash Portal mistakenly mark a ballot as unverified, there is no clear process by which state election officials or voters themselves can challenge the rejection. The Rule simply vaguely states that they “will be informed of the escalation procedures should they decide to challenge a rejection.” Voters intending to cast ballots by mail may not even be aware that their ballots have been rejected, or were part of a rejected batch, until it is too late to secure an alternative ballot or vote in person. Expecting a well-built, thoughtful Portal to return an accurate result 100 percent of the time is already a stretch—expecting a “rushed,” “risky and haphazard” Portal to do the same is a recipe for disaster.

A zero percent failure rate means that a single bad scan (which could happen for any reason) could block thousands of ballots (literally all of which could be legit and fine) from being sent out. Given that eight states already run elections entirely by mail, this could mean significant percentages of voters just not receiving their ballots at all.

And, we’re relying on a hastily built system with barely any testing not to have any bad scans that lead to thousands of ballots being blocked.

Of course, what Blumenthal and the whistleblower call “risky and haphazard” most others might call “deliberately designed to suppress votes and create chaos that will allow MAGA to call into question the validity of an election.”

Look, this is just terrifying: the president and his administration are building a system designed to guarantee that fewer people receive their ballots, in a manner designed to create obvious chaos around an election they don’t expect to win. Whatever you want to call the intent, that’s an executive branch actively degrading the machinery of free and fair elections.

That should be the biggest story in the country.

Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear that he thinks the federal government works for him, and him alone. It does not. It works for the American people, and a court has already told USPS exactly that, twice. One postal employee understood the assignment well enough to risk their job and blow the whistle over it. It’s about time that more started to do so as well.

When Twitter launched, it was originally designed to be just like an open protocol. In the early days, the company eagerly supported third party development, building on that protocol. But, because it was a new communications protocol totally controlled by a single company, eventually commercial pressure led the company to close off the openness. Jack Dorsey later admitted that this was a mistake, and he hoped that Twitter would go back to being an open protocol. That eventually led to the rise of Bluesky (where I am now on the board, having taken Dorsey’s old board seat) and the ATprotocol (along with some other competing protocols, each with a different implementation, but all believing in the value of open social systems).

And, of course, in the middle of all this, Elon Musk took over Twitter. You may remember that. Even though Jack Dorsey supported Elon’s bid, and suggested he embrace the open protocol aspect of where Twitter was heading, Elon went in a very different direction.

It’s funny now, four years on, to read those text messages between Jack and Elon, with Jack pushing for Elon to embrace reinventing Twitter as a decentralized open protocol, and Elon nodding along.

But, of course, that’s not what happened. Instead, what happened was Twitter became X, the personal, centralized, deliberately political project of Elon that no longer had any real resemblance to an open communications protocol. Almost immediately upon taking control, Elon began locking things down, and putting very high prices on access. There have been many changes to the API (and its pricing) since Elon took over the company (which eventually merged into xAI and then into SpaceX), but the one constant is that it’s a walled garden, focused almost exclusively on promoting the things Elon wants promoted, while demoting the things he’s scared of.

This has been known and somewhat obvious for years. But last week, it appears Elon put the final nail in the coffin for the belief that X might one day be an open protocol ever again. There were two widely known and widely used services for sharing posts on X without having to point people to X itself: Nitter and Xcancel. With both of them, if you wanted to share any particular tweet, you could just replace the “X.com” part of the URL (or the “twitter.com” part before that got rerouted) to either “nitter.net” or “xcancel.com” and you could see the same tweet (and the same thread above and below it) without giving Elon any of the traffic.

If you are an open protocol, that’s how it should work. Indeed, if you want to read Bluesky posts without ever touching Bluesky itself, there are already a bunch of independent ways to do it — different clients, different frontends, different views on the same underlying data — with more coming online all the time.

But, just to make it clear that X is a walled garden completely controlled by Elon and no one else, last week, X sent cease & desist notices to both Nitter and Xcancel, causing them to shut down.

That’s Nitter saying:

Cease and desist

On 24 August 2026 cease and desist letters have been sent by X Corp. demanding a permanent takedown of Nitter instances and the project’s repository.

nitter.net is offline and development has stopped for the time being. I’m seeking legal advice and won’t be commenting further on the specifics for now.

Thank you to everyone who used, hosted, packaged, donated and contributed to Nitter over the past seven years.

Xcancel just put up some text saying something very similar:

On Monday 24th August at 8PM EST, we received at letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel.
The service XCancel is stopped until further notice.
We are seeking legal advice and won’t share more details for now.
Thank you for the trust you have put in these two years of XCancel.

This does real harm to many people, not just those who didn’t want to support Elon Musk. Many journalists and researchers would use these tools to track things in ways that Elon’s platform might not allow (or for which he might ban users). And, as Elon has continually locked down X, many things now require a login to view. It also makes a mess of many archives, including Wikipedia citations, that frequently relied on Nitter links.

While the cease and desist letters have not been publicly revealed, TechCrunch claims they were able to see them, and they accused the platforms of circumventing X’s API restrictions.

The letter from X, which TechCrunch has viewed, accuses Nitter of an “unlawful use and circumvention of X’s Application Programming Interface (API) and associated data,” through its service, saying that X has evidence that Nitter scraped X data and accessed X accounts and session tokens in violation of X’s rules.

Lawyers for X said the actions are in violation of “various state and federal laws, including, but not limited to, the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act (§ 143.001 and § 33.02) and the Lanham Act (15 U.S.C. §§ 1114, 1125).” The letter gave Nitter until 5 p.m. EST on August 25 to shut down.

The legal theories here are basically bullshit. The “Harmful Access by Computer Act” is basically a Texas state version of the CFAA, the deeply problematic federal “anti-hacking” law that is regularly abused to stop people from doing things that should be perfectly legal. And while there have been some cases, like the Power Ventures case, that blessed the idea that such laws can block scraping, courts have been much more open to saying that there’s no hacking in merely scraping openly available web pages, such as in HiQ v. LinkedIn.

In fact, Musk and his lawyers should know all this is bullshit, because he lost his earlier lawsuit against Bright Data over scraping X.

The Lanham Act (trademark) claims seem equally bullshit. There’s zero likelihood of confusion here. The reason people use these sites is not because they confuse them with X, but deliberately because they are not X. And, to whatever extent either site referred back to X (or Twitter), that would be nominative fair use as accurately describing the source of the content.

Still, most of that is besides the point. X doesn’t need to actually win in court. Elon just needs it to be more expensive to fight him. And given that he literally has more money than anyone else in the world (and most companies to boot), there is no fair fight between a legal threat from him against a volunteer maintainer of an open source project.

But this is how walled gardens get built. X isn’t building a better product. It’s using Elon’s vast resources and ability to conjure up legal threats to shut down any system that enables openness.

To be clear, X is hardly alone in doing things like this. And some of it is absolutely due to the rise of AI scrapers and the desire of companies to sell access to their data. Reddit famously made a bunch of changes to its API a few years ago to limit access, and recently cut access even more. The widespread walling off of the open internet to fight AI scrapers is going to have some long-term negative consequences.

But rather than accept this, it should be even more incentive to embrace the tools that put us, not large companies, in control over our data.

Paul Frazee, Bluesky’s CTO, and an instrumental player in creating the ATprotocol that powers Bluesky and a bunch of other “locked open” apps recently wrote about this on Leaflet (a long-form blogging platform also powered by ATprotocol), in an article he called SELECT * FROM internet.blogposts. In that article, he highlights how the web has turned into a bunch of silos, and more and more of them keep locking the door:

The walled garden problem is downstream of a simple question: how do I SELECT * FROM internet?

If you’ve never written database code, SELECT * FROM users is how you ask a database for everything it knows about its users. Once you have it you can filter it, sort it, and join it against anything else you’ve got.

The web doesn’t historically work that way. The web is a few dozen companies, each holding a filing cabinet, each with a receptionist posted out front. He’ll read you one file at a time, but only files you can name, as fast as he cares to read, and as long as his boss allows.

The fact that “the web doesn’t historically work that way” is a historical error. Indeed, for many years, most people did think it worked that way. Google’s existence is kind of premised on the fact that it absolutely could ‘SELECT * FROM internet’ to build its index. The entire premise of the open internet was that everything could be indexed and searched, even if the SQL query were hidden behind a nicer UI.

But now, various companies (including Google!) have used a variety of both technical and legal measures to wall things off again.

Open protocols do a lot of useful things, but the most important may be that they lock the openness in place, so that no single company can send a legal threat letter and revoke it. A system like ATprotocol doesn’t rely on APIs controlled by a single company that can change them or cut off a provider. Instead, it corrects one of the original sins of the web: rather than one company holding all the data for a particular service, anyone can hold it. You can hold your own data (many people do) or you can let someone else (such as Bluesky) hold onto it, though in a manner where you can always take it out of their control, and host it yourself or somewhere else.

This is one of the reasons why I find ATprotocol so exciting. People looking at it as just a new way to build a Twitter clone have always missed the point. It’s a way to rebuild the entire web, where the users have way more control. Rather than handing over control to a new or different company and hoping they don’t enshittify, the entire setup is enabling the end users to have full control over their own data.

Killing off Nitter and Xcancel is the last step in Elon’s transformation of Twitter from something that wanted to be a new, open communications protocol, to “X,” a locked up, private platform tuned to the whims of a wealthy propagandist.

Every few months or so, someone writes an article about why you should get off of X, because every bit of engagement there feeds money, data, and influence to the world’s richest man in service of his fascistic political project, or because its algorithm is directly programmed to make you angry about stupid shit.

But I think there’s a more important reason: X’s transformation from a kind of open decentralized communications protocol to a closed bullshit delivery mechanism is symptomatic of many of the things going wrong in the world today, from the enshittification of all sorts of products and services, to the rise of authoritarianism around the globe.

Getting power back in the hands of the public doesn’t happen by further empowering the controllers of today’s data silos. Elon’s not going to help give you more power if you ask him nicely. Getting the power back means building and using the tools that make permission irrelevant in the first place.