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A U.S. Postal Service whistleblower is warning that the agency’s efforts to develop systems to restrict mail ballot delivery for the November election have been rushed through testing, are unreliable, and could prevent millions of Americans from receiving mail ballots this November.
The anonymous whistleblower’s concerns were detailed in a 20-page complaint released by Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s (D-Conn.) office Tuesday that describes the Postal Service plans, which have been temporarily frozen by a court order, as “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed.”
Problems with the system have become so widespread, the letter detailing the whistleblower’s complaint said, that a number of Postal Service officials have described development of a planned election mail ballot IT system as “a shit show.”
Blumenthal characterized the Postal Service efforts as a deliberate attempt by the Trump administration to suppress the vote and undermine the ability of Americans to vote by mail.
“This is not just incompetence, it is designed malfunction,” he said in a conference call with reporters about the whistleblower complaint. “And it is malign, designed malfunction in a way that clearly reveals a political purpose: depressing the vote.”
In a letter to the Postal Service, Blumenthal described the whistleblower complaint as “alarming” and asked the agency to explain its actions by Friday.
“Taken together they present a clear picture of a fatally flawed process that cannot and will not protect American voters,” Blumenthal wrote. “Put plainly: this process will likely lead to chaos, confusion, and the inability of many Americans to have their vote counted.”
A Postal Service spokesperson, who had not seen the whistleblower complaint, declined Monday to comment.
At issue is an effort by the Trump administration to use the Postal Service to place new restrictions on the delivery of mail ballots this November.
President Donald Trump released an executive order in March directing the Postal Service to set up the new rules, which prompted a tangle of rapid lawsuits from voting rights groups, nearly two dozen Democrat-led states, and Democratic political organizations.
Under the agency’s plan, states would have to use a new online portal to send the Postal Service a list of all voters that should receive mail ballots. The Postal Service would refuse to send ballots to anyone not on the list. The envelopes would have to meet new design standards, including unique barcodes that have to be checked by the Postal Service. The plan has caused confusion among election officials unsure if they need to comply with it, or when the portal will be available.
One federal judge in June declared the effort an unconstitutional effort by the federal government to usurp state authority over elections and blocked the Postal Service from moving ahead with the effort for this November’s election. The Postal Service plan has been at the center of a complex back-and-forth legal battle that is likely to eventually be settled by the U.S. Supreme Court.
At the moment, the Postal Service plans are frozen by a temporary injunction imposed by U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani, a federal judge in Massachusetts, who will decide in the coming days whether to issue a permanent ban on enacting the system for this election. On Monday, she declined to stay her temporary injunction, but allowed the Postal Service to continue its work developing the portal; more appeals are a near-certainty.
The account was relayed by the organization Whistleblower Aid, which said it represents the anonymous whistleblower. The complaint said that the Postal Service violated an earlier Talwani order blocking the agency from working on the system while the matter worked its way through the courts. Instead, the whistleblower said, work on the project resumed in July, about a month after Talwani issued her order ordering the Postal Service to halt development of the plans. Postal Service staff were rushing to meet an internal Sept. 1 deadline to get the system up-and-running, according to the whistleblower’s account.
Talwani, in a ruling last week, criticized the Postal Service for resuming work on the project.
The whistleblower account described the continued work as “slapdash.” The person warned the process “deviates dangerously” from normal practices and could cause “catastrophic disruption to our coming nationwide elections based on the reckless pursuit of readying a new, insufficiently tested, poorly planned mail-in ballot screening system.”
Whistleblower warns opportunity for error is high
The biggest concern raised by the whistleblower’s account was the prospect that a poorly tested Postal Service system would reject millions of mail ballots from reaching voters this November.
As planned, the Postal Service system would take a random sample of bulk mail ballots going to voters to make sure the envelopes all contained required information, including special bar codes tied to each voter. If the computers found that one ballot failed the check, even if it was a mistake, the Postal Service system would reject all the ballots in the mailing and send them back to the state.
That, the whistleblower account warned, could lead to a “catastrophic failure” that prevents millions of Americans from voting this November.
“The election ballot mail IT system systems were rapidly built and minimally tested,” according to the complaint prepared by Whistleblower Aid. “Accordingly, the opportunity for error and other failure with this new IT system comparing a batch manifest with the new statewide list is high.”
The whistleblower account detailed a series of problems with development and testing of the new computer system, which the person said can take nine months to a year to debug.
“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,” according to the whistleblower complaint.
Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.
