The U.S. Postal Service is barreling ahead with a “secretive, rushed” effort to implement President Donald Trump’s order to wield federal control over November's election in violation of court orders, according to a new whistleblower report.
The new report, which was put together by the USPS whistleblower's lawyers and released by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), comes amidst multiple court challenges to the president's proposal to require states to submit lists of their mail-in voters or face penalties, reported CNN.
"[An] 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," CNN reported. "Those procedures will make an already complicated and risky plan even more vulnerable to potential mass disenfranchisement, the whistleblower says."
Multiple USPS employees described the development process as a "s--- show" as the agency raced toward a Sept. 1 launch, according to the whistleblower, and agency leadership "discarded all best practices" in the rush, prompting questions about "whether catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug."
"The main takeaway for me," Blumenthal said, "is that the Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans. One-third of all Americans cast their ballots by mail, and the USPS puts all of their votes at risk.”
The system stems from an executive order Trump signed in March granting USPS an unprecedented role in screening states' mail voting programs. Under the plan, states would submit lists of mail voters to USPS, which would refuse to deliver ballots if the information didn't match what its scanners picked up on ballot envelopes.
The whistleblower says the verification process leaves virtually no margin for error. Voter information submitted through the new portal must align precisely with "manifests" and unique barcodes that election officials attach to each ballot batch. If even a single scanned envelope fails to match, USPS could withhold an entire batch, potentially delaying thousands of ballots at once while officials scramble to fix the discrepancy.
Internally, the report alleges, project requirements changed constantly and were often never put in writing, even as IT staff pressed leadership for clarity.
Leadership, the whistleblower says, insisted the requirements were self-evident and that there wasn't time to document them, and developers reportedly had less than a week to test the finished system, with only four days built in for outside user testing — a window the report calls "entirely unreasonable" for software handling ballots.
It's unclear whether the portal was actually ready to launch Tuesday as planned. The rollout is already tangled in litigation, and a federal judge last week blocked USPS from requiring states to use the system, though the agency can still offer it to states that participate voluntarily. The Justice Department is appealing.
North Carolina begins mailing ballots this week, with other states following later in September.
"As designed, the process is entirely unforgiving," the report states. "It could delay ballots by the thousands in repeated verification cycles – and thus prevent states from mailing enormous numbers of ballots."
The system, as designed, could have an impact big enough to shake up November's election results, the whistleblowers warned.
“Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,” the official said in the report, which was prepared with the assistance of the nonprofit group Whistleblower Aid.