An anonymous federal official warned in a whistleblower complaint this week that the technical system the U.S. Postal Service built for mail voting is flawed, untested and likely to cause major disruptions in this fall’s midterm elections if it is implemented.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March that directed his administration to create federal lists of citizens and asked the Postal Service to transmit mail ballots to only those people. A federal judge has blocked the order from going into effect amid ongoing litigation over its constitutionality; the whistleblower complaint highlights potential issues that could arise if the courts ultimately declare it lawful.
The USPS typically is responsible only for transporting mail ballots between election officials and voters, and the federal government has never kept a central list of all American citizens. Trump ordered the agency to take on an unprecedented and complex role in the process this year amid a broader attempt to exert greater control over the country’s elections and his continued unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud.
The technical system the USPS assembled to vet voters was developed in a “rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed process,” according to a whistleblower complaint sent to the office of Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., a member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Blumenthal sent the complaint to Postmaster General David Steiner on Monday asking for more information.
“This administration seems hell-bent on changing the framework of casting ballots in this country, clearly for political reasons,” Blumenthal said on a call with reporters Monday. “It is unconstitutional, as is argued in the courts by the litigation that is ongoing, but this disclosure indicates that it is also blatantly incompetent and incapable of actually delivering ballots that are lawful in this midterm election.”
The whistleblower is identified as an anonymous federal official who is being represented by Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit group that represents public- and private-sector employees making such complaints. They allege that the USPS didn’t begin building its portal for verifying ballots “in earnest” until June, giving itself less than three months to complete a system that would ordinarily take at least nine to 12 months to build.
The agency last month finalized the rule for how it would implement the changes, which would create a massive new workload for election officials and put up hurdles for millions of voters to cast ballots by mail.
Large batches of ballots would be rejected by the portal if even a single ballot couldn’t be verified, the whistleblower said.
“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 complaint reads. “Even under ordinary circumstances this would be problematic because of predictable errors in any barcode scanning process.”
The whistleblower said workers involved in developing the USPS system feared it would crash and described the process just days before the project was originally scheduled to be released to the public Tuesday as a “s— show,” according to the complaint.
The whistleblower also said the USPS had ordered workers to continue developing its system, despite court orders blocking implementation of the project.
A federal court order Monday stated that the government could continue building its portal as long as the states aren’t required to participate.
The USPS and the White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.
