A federal employee has told Congress that the U.S. Postal Service rushed an untested computer system for handling mail ballots into place ahead of the November midterm elections, and that a single formatting error could cause an entire batch of ballots to be rejected.
The disclosure was prepared by attorneys at the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid and released this week by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. CyberScoop, which reviewed the complaint, reported that it describes the development of a Federal Ballot Mail Portal as secretive, rushed and fundamentally flawed.
The portal stems from an executive order President Donald Trump signed in March that directed the government to compile federal citizenship lists and instructed the Postal Service to deliver federal mail ballots only to people on those lists. Under the design, the agency would screen ballot batches submitted by state election officials before agreeing to mail them.
The complaint focuses on how that screening works. Axios reported that the system checks barcodes on incoming ballots against data uploaded by state officials, and that one faulty barcode can cause the whole batch to be rejected. If a state submits 10,000 ballots and one fails the check, according to the disclosure, the state would have to take all of them back and correct the problem.
The timeline is a second concern raised in the document. NBC News reported that the agency did not begin building the portal in earnest until June, leaving under three months for work that would ordinarily take nine to 12 months. The complaint alleges that USPS eliminated standard testing and debugging to meet the deadline, moved unfinished components into later testing environments, and divided development across teams that never tested the system as a whole.
The disclosure further alleges that work continued while two court injunctions were in force, in State of California v. Trump and League of Women Voters of Massachusetts v. Trump. The last of those injunctions was lifted Aug. 26.
Blumenthal said the system was "set up to fail" and told reporters that the allegations raise questions about both the legality and the competence of the effort, ABC News reported. The complaint warns that some voters could receive their ballots late or not at all.
The White House disputed the allegations in a statement Tuesday, according to NBC News. The Postal Service said it was carefully reviewing the claims, NPR reported, and the agency has defended the project as an effort to carry out the executive order within the timeframe it was given. The whistleblower is anonymous, and the specific technical claims in the disclosure have not been independently verified.
The agency faced a Sept. 1 deadline to deliver the portal. Whether it is used this fall still depends on the courts, since the underlying executive order remains the subject of active litigation.