According to a new whistleblower report released by Sen. Richard Blumenthal on Tuesday, the United States Postal Service is planning to implement procedures that could create catastrophic failure to deliver thousands of mail-in ballots in the mid-term elections.
“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.
A new system of verifying ballots has some USPS officials internally calling the process a “shit show” as IT agents have been forced to barrel through the process, and were given four days to test the screening system.
The plans the IT staff were shown for the system were “constantly changing” from the beginning, and systems’ requirements were not clearly put in writing for the development staff, the whistleblower says.
The report says that USPS leadership “insisted that it was easy to understand what was needed and also that there was no time to write down the requirements.”
The screening procedure allows zero room for error.
- According to the whistleblower, in the first round of verification the voter information in the portal will be compared with “manifests” election officials must also submit for each batch of ballots they intend to drop off.
- The information on the “manifests” would include unique bar codes assigned to each voter, and must match perfectly with information in the portal before election officials are allowed to drop off the ballots.
- Then when election officials bring ballots to the USPS for delivery, either the entire batch of ballot envelopes or a sampling will be physically scanned – depending on where the ballots are being dropped.
- 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.