The Supreme Court just cleared the way for the Postal Service to screen voters' eligibility before mailing out ballots — but one longtime postal official is undercutting the administration's demand that they can make it happen before the midterms.
According to NOTUS, the Court this week temporarily allowed USPS to move forward with a plan, based on a Trump executive order, requiring states to submit lists of eligible voters so the Postal Service can block ballots from going to anyone not on the list. The rule still faces legal challenges, but USPS "must now bring thousands of state and local election offices up to speed" before some states start mailing ballots as early as September.
Tom Day, a 35-year Postal Service veteran who helped build the agency's network technology and now sits on the Postal Regulatory Commission, called the timeline unworkable, telling NOTUS, " USPS has proposed something it has never done before, which would require a heavy lift."
“This is not something where you just flip the switch and turn it on,” he told NOTUS. “I don’t know how the hell they’re going to do it.”
Pointing out, “No system works at 100% accuracy,” Day elaborated that the USPS "would normally spend at least a year rolling out a system like this," including training roughly 8,000 election boards nationwide.
Without that runway, he predicted a 20% to 30% error before warning, "and that would be a disaster."
He added: "We haven't run the tests to give us the validity that the damn thing will work. To do it in three weeks, my God, there's no way."
A senior postal official echoed the concern about burdening states with little notice, telling NOTUS: "We're getting near Labor Day here. Just the uncertainty, I can only imagine trying to be a state election official. What can you do?"