Yesterday we learned that the U.S. Postal Service has been secretly building a new "Federal Ballot Mail Portal" to review state requests to transmit mail-in ballots to voters. According to a recent USPS rule that has been temporarily blocked by a federal court, before the Postal Service will deliver a mail-in ballot to a voter, it must compare the name on the envelope with a list submitted by state election officials.
According to the whistleblower, the build-out of this system has been "sloppy and rushed." They point to the fact that the new system has "a zero-percent failure policy." The result, according to them, is that entire batches of ballot requests will be rejected if any single one of them contains an error.
Here is how they explain it in the complaint: "As presently designed, if even one bar code on one single ballot in a bulk-mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to properly scan during the verification process, the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the state — effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed to voters."
The whistleblower views this as a serious flaw in the system. "Even under ordinary circumstances this would be problematic," they point out, "because of predictable errors in any barcode scanning process."
And of course, because this entire system has been rushed and subject to court orders halting work, these are not "ordinary circumstances."
What the whistleblower and others see as a serious flaw in the system is — I am virtually certain — viewed by the White House as one of its primary virtues...
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