The U.S. Postal Service has been building a new system to carry out President Trump’s push to restrict mail-in voting, including an online portal for states to submit voter information before absentee ballots go into the mail. An anonymous federal official says the system was rushed and could keep ballots from reaching eligible voters on time.
As part of the ongoing legal fight over Trump’s mail voting order, a federal judge has temporarily blocked USPS from requiring states to use the portal in order to send out their mail-in ballots for the midterm election.
The Postal Service is appealing that ruling.
David Kligerman, the official’s lawyer at Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit that provides legal support to whistleblowers, said the USPS process would place several new requirements between states and voters. States would submit voter information for batches of ballots, which USPS would then sample and verify.
“You’ve got a 0% failure rate, which, by the way, is unprecedented. No other part of the mail system has this,” Kligerman told Morning Edition.
A single problem in a sample of ballots, from a smudged barcode to a scanner that fails to read one, could send the whole batch back to the state, Kligerman said.
The whistleblower alleges the IT system was built in a matter of weeks, has not been adequately tested and has crashed during testing. The whistleblower says the IT system’s rushed development creates a central concern: The technology could flag a mistake even when the ballots themselves are correct, sending states through the process again and potentially delaying ballots from reaching voters.
In a statement, USPS said it is “carefully reviewing” the whistleblower’s concerns.
The administration says the requirements are meant to verify who is receiving absentee ballots. Lawsuits challenging the plan argue that USPS has no authority to perform that role. Kligerman questioned the process on practical grounds, too.
“This is a solution that does not meet the problem,” he said. “If you want to verify to whom it’s sent to, there’s a very different way to do it than this.”
Listen to the full interview by clicking the blue button above. Hansi Lo Wang contributed reporting.
Editor’s note: USPS if a financial supporter of NPR.
