USPS whistleblower predicts ‘catastrophic’ effect on elections under Trump vote-by-mail order

Filed 51m ago · Via Florida Phoenix · The Buffoon Desk

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Flight of the Bumblebee

Rimsky-Korsakov — U.S. Air Force Band · Public Domain

Photo: Jeff Hitchcock from Seattle, WA, USA · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

A U.S. Postal Service whistleblower alleges the agency rushed development of an online ballot-verification portal required by a Trump administration policy restricting mail-in voting, and continued building it in defiance of a federal injunction, according to a complaint published by Sen. Richard Blumenthal.

The whistleblower says the system demands a zero-percent failure rate, meaning a single unreadable barcode in a batch of 10,000 ballots could get the entire batch rejected and returned to the state, potentially over something as routine as a name change after marriage.

Development reportedly began in June, months later than the nine months to a year the whistleblower says a project this size would normally require, with insufficient testing and states expected to start using the portal as soon as September 1. USPS did not respond to a request for comment, and no officials were named as directing the work to continue after the court order.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

There is something clarifying about an agency that treats a court injunction as a scheduling suggestion and a zero-percent failure rate as an achievable engineering goal rather than a rejection machine wearing a lanyard. The refusal to comment is the most honest thing in the file: when the only defense available is silence, silence is at least accurate. Any institution that builds the plumbing of an election on a deadline it invented and a standard nothing has ever met is not securing anything — it is pre-writing the excuse.

Source: Read the original at Florida Phoenix → Scored: Flight of the Bumblebee · Rimsky-Korsakov — U.S. Air Force Band · CC BY 4.0

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