The US Postal Service effort to develop a sweeping new system for verifying mail ballots has invited a host of IT concerns among agency officials, with some describing the process internally as a “sh*t show,” according to a new whistleblower report released Tuesday by a Democratic senator.
The unnamed whistleblower is alleging that some of the procedures USPS is planning — under mandates put forward by President Donald Trump — have been hidden from the public. Those procedures will make an already complicated and risky plan even more vulnerable to potential mass disenfranchisement, the whistleblower says.
“USPS leadership, it appears, has discarded all best practices as they speed the project to be ready for a September 1 implementation — raising questions about whether catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug,” said the report.
The Mandate
Trump signed an executive order in March that gave the USPS an unprecedented role in screening states’ mail ballot programs. Election officials have already expressed deep concerns about having to use a system that has not gone through extensive testing and training procedures.
The system would require that states submit to USPS lists of their mail-in voters. The agency will not deliver ballots for states if there are any discrepancies between the voter information in the USPS system and what’s picked up by agency scanners on the envelopes of the ballots.
The Testing Chaos
Internally, according to the whistleblower, USPS’ IT teams were going to be given less than a week to test the system once it was finished, due to the time crunch of the electoral calendar. North Carolina begins sending ballots this week, and other states join it later this month.
In the final week of testing, the phrase “sh*t show” was used by multiple people to describe the process, the whistleblower alleges in the report, which identifies other examples of USPS barreling through the process of creating the system.
The plans the IT staff were shown for the system were “constantly changing” from the beginning, and the system’s requirements were not clearly put in writing for the development staff, the whistleblower says. USPS leadership was dismissive of concerns and, according to the report, “insisted that it was easy to understand what was needed and also that there was no time to write down the requirements.”
The Verification Nightmare
The concerns about the untested nature of the system are particularly acute because if there are any discrepancies between the voter lists that election officials have submitted and the ballots they’re seeking to send, USPS could reject the entire batches of ballots — meaning tens of thousands of ballots could go unsent at a time — until the discrepancy is fixed.
The whistleblower says that there will be a first round of verification — in a process not spelled out in the public regulations — comparing the voter information in the portal with “manifests” election officials must also submit for each batch of ballots they intend to drop off.
When election officials bring ballots to their USPS site for delivery, either the entire batch of ballot envelopes or a sampling will be physically scanned. If just a single ballot envelope scan does not align with the information in the portal, USPS will refuse to deliver the entire batch of ballots while the discrepancy is being sorted out.
“As designed, the process is entirely unforgiving. It could delay ballots by the thousands in repeated verification cycles — and thus prevent states from mailing enormous numbers of ballots,” the report says.
The Legal Status
A judge last week froze the mandates that the states use the system if they want USPS to deliver their ballots, but said USPS could still offer the portal to states that voluntarily want to upload the mail voter information. The Justice Department is appealing that ruling.
It’s not clear whether the portal is ready to be launched on Tuesday, as was the goal, according to the whistleblower report.
The Bottom Line
A USPS whistleblower alleges that a new mail ballot verification system, mandated by President Trump, has been rushed and hidden from the public. The system could disenfranchise thousands of voters if any discrepancies arise between voter lists and ballot envelopes. USPS leadership dismissed concerns, and testing was described as a “sh*t show.” A judge has frozen the mandate but allowed voluntary use of the system
