Postal Service Whistleblower Warns New Rule Could Cause ‘Catastrophic Failure’ For Mail-In Voting

An anonymous whistleblower submitted a report to Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., about the implementation of USPS’s new rule on mail-in voting, which requires election officials to submit voter information to a federal database as a condition for the Postal Service to deliver mail-in ballots.

USPS’s rollout of the new rule has been a “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed process,” the whistleblower alleged, with the agency implementing a new IT system that was “rapidly built and minimally tested” and could result in a “catastrophic failure which could derail the midterm elections.”

The new system could lead to voters not receiving ballots, the whistleblower alleged, pointing to new verification processes that require mail-in ballots to have special barcodes to ensure they’ve been approved in the federal system and noting the “opportunity for error … is high.”

The way the system is designed means that if even one barcode in a batch of 10,000 doesn’t scan properly, the entire batch of ballots would be rejected and sent back to election officials, the whistleblower alleged, “effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed to voters.”

While the new USPS rule is currently blocked in court, the whistleblower alleged workers were directed to continue developing the new system even as court orders were in place barring the agency from moving forward with implementing it, alleging the “ongoing work” was “inconsistent” with the agency’s claims that it was not implementing the new rule for the midterm elections while the court orders against it were in place.

The Postal Service has not yet commented on the whistleblower report.