A whistleblower within the United States Postal Service (USPS) is warning of covert plans by the Trump administration to reshape the nation’s mail-in ballot verification system in ways that could disenfranchise scores of American voters.
According to a letter released by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) on Tuesday, his office received information about a whistleblower disclosure alleging that the Trump administration intends to give USPS broad authority to refuse to mail electoral ballots. “USPS will, for the first time, play a gatekeeping function and be in a position to refuse to mail ballots that state election officials have determined should be sent out,” the letter says,” and will do so via an error riddled platform that was rush ordered by the administration.
Last month, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to implement mail-in voting restrictions outlined in an executive order signed by the president in March. Among other provisions, the order requires states to provide the USPS with lists of all the voters it intends to issue return-by-mail ballots to, and grants the agency the authority to refuse to mail out the ballot.
The whistleblower contends that, given the manner the order is being implemented, a single discrepancy in the lists provided to USPS could result in batches of thousands of ballots being rejected en masse.
“Not only is this system astonishingly untested, USPS has simultaneously implemented an impracticable zero percent failure rate,” the letter reads, “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.”
The whistleblower wrote in their report that the current expectation is that states would have to take back thousands of ballots to cure a single issue with a registration or the list, leading to delays and other complications for voters. “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,” Blumenthal’s office added.
White House Spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement to Rolling Stone that “The process of building software to carry out this new verification check is neither complex nor unique for USPS since the Postal Service regularly uses bulk mailing and intelligent mail barcodes for a wide variety of large customers. Under President Trump, the federal government is working to ensure safe, transparent, and honest elections.”
The White House did not address separate questions posed by Rolling Stone regarding whether USPS would implement a system to notify individuals whose ballots were rejected, or allow them to challenge any discrepancies.
Furthermore, the whistleblower alleges that the program built to process the millions of mail in ballots expected for the November midterms has not been properly tested, and is error prone.
The portal was built in roughly a three month timespan — with a one month pause as the courts litigated the constitutionality of the executive order. “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,” the letter relays.
Trump, who himself voted by mail for a special election in Florida earlier this year, has said in the past that “mail-in voting means mail-in cheating.” While the GOP has attempted to associate mail and absentee voting with Democratic constituencies, nearly one in five registered Republicans vote by mail. Their plans to restrict the practice for their opposition could just as easily disenfranchise their own voters.
Fraud in American elections takes place at microscopic rates, but Americans should worry about the integrity of their elections, as MAGA Republicans are waging a multi front war against the freedom to vote.
