- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
The US Postal Service effort to develop a sweeping new system for verifying mail ballots has invited a host of IT concerns among agency officials, with some describing the process internally as a “sh*t show,” according to a new whistleblower report released Tuesday by a Democratic senator.
The unnamed whistleblower is alleging that some of the procedures USPS is planning – under mandates put forward by President Donald Trump – have been hidden from the public. Those procedures will make an already complicated and risky plan even more vulnerable to potential mass disenfranchisement, the whistleblower says.
The new report – which was assembled by the whistleblowers’ lawyers and released by Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal – comes as multiple courts are considering the legality of the proposal, which would require that states submit to USPS lists of their mail-in voters. The agency will not deliver ballots for states if there are any discrepancies between the voter information in the USPS system and what’s picked up by agency scanners on the envelopes of the ballots.
You must log in or register to comment.
States operate elections. States decide what is a valid or invalid ballot. USPS is not a state.
Ideally, yes.
But the post service in the US is federalized under the USPS. And the USPS has been run by an orangeboi sycophant for about a decade at this point, who had made numerous changes to make mail ballots - both distribution and retrieval thereof - more strict and difficult, with the net effect of disenfranchising millions of voters.
Voter fraud is vanishingly rare.
Electoral fraud is a standard and commonly used strategy by the GOP in particular.
This is electoral fraud.
It’d be nice if we could use RICO laws to go after anyone in the USPS that is involved with doing this - the planning, the implementing, everything is swept up and given maximum penalty.
God I hope the timeline pans out that way :|
One can dream, Nurnberg trial for the whole administration
This isn’t about how States conduct their elections. Each state can have mail-in voting, there’s nothing stopping them from conducting their elections that way. The problem, which this is all about, is that the States rely on a federal service to do the delivering of the ballots part, which is what is getting fucked about with.
Is there any way states could do something to obscure what is being sent, I wonder?
In the worst case, maybe they use library systems to get ballots as close to citizens as possible. Or offer a way to walk in to your nearest state government building and get one to fill out and drop off later.
My largest concern here in Colorado is that we still have a way to do it at our leisure and that there is a huge window of time to exercise the picking up (if required) and the dropping off. Preferably many weeks.
States don’t operate their own postal services though, and this is the problem. A state can allow mail-in voting, but if the USPS doesn’t deliver the ballots, then the state effectively doesn’t have mail-in voting.
USPS is not a state.
But they control the mail. Once you mail it, it’s in their hands to do as they want with it. Don’t assume they won’t do illegal stuff just because it’s illegal. We should all know that by now.
So that’s the plan - when Democratic states don’t comply to hand over their voter records, the postal service simply refuses to deliver their ballots from the Board of Elections. They can’t vote if they never get the ballot in the first place.
And just like EVERYTHING else he ever does, it doesn’t matter if it is blatantly illegal, against the constitution, violates everything, if we don’t enforce it IMMEDIATELY then it is already too late and we are stuck with the consequences.
He shouldn’t even BE president right now. He is illegal and illegitimate on account of commiting treason and insurrection. But no one enforced the law or constitution and so here we are.
And they are going to keep doing that until we say ENOUGH.
Even if they do deliver them, I’m sure the verification process will be incredibly slow in blue states, so that the ballots will arrive after voting day.
This is the heart of the plan. Postal delays ensuring these votes won’t be counted. Nothing “illegal” about “incompetence”.
Meanwhile on Facebook posts about this, bots are pushing memes about how “The Democrats can’t cheat this time.”
I still have to laugh how conservative idiots believed and still believe that Big Tech is liberal and that the liberals in Big Tech actively worked to “cancel” them, shadowban, etc because they were conservatives…when were any of them ever cancelled for discussing smaller government or lower taxes?
No, if any of them had posts deleted or accounts given a time out, it was because they were doing something else like hate speech, etc…that for some weird reason, seems to be something conservatives require. Strange.
Anyway, for anyone to think that FB, Youtube, etc., are “liberal” means they are in complete delusion.
Must be Tuesday because that’s another profound infringement of civil liberties.
If there are discrepancies like addresses? That means my mail in ballot is going to be flagged, because my house is in address limbo (used to be an apartment but not anymore, and USPS has rejected packages being sent to me because I did not put “Apt 1” at the end of my address).
This is just going to disenfranchise those living between addresses and people caught in red tape living in apartment houses.
Truly a shit show. I’m voting in person from now until question marks.
Not just that but any black hole you might find yourself in when two totally separate government systems don’t agree on one particular detail and neither agency wants to take ownership of the problem so it never gets fixed.
Register as a Republican, and they won’t screw with you. Then vote Democrat, and completely screw up their plans.
They will claim massive voter fraud if there is a large discrepancy between registrations and votes.
They will do that regardless. They always do. Hell, they already are doing it.
Don’t let that stop you, they will do it anyway. Why comply in advance, especially when you already know they are going to cry fraud?
They will claim voter fraud if your mail-in ballot is received on a day of the week that ends in “y”
Nope. Don’t fucking do this. Do not comply in advance.
Oregon has mail-in-voting, but also closed primaries so if I registered as Repiblican, I would only be able to vote in the Republican primary.
Yeah wait I’ve never thought about that. Is that illegal to do?
It’s not illegal, but in many states you can only vote in a party’s primary if you are registered as a member of that party.
Gotcha, so probably not a great idea. Local elections are really important too
Under the timeline sketched out to meet the September 1 deadline, there would only be four days allotted for it to go through a stage in the development process in which potential users of the system can test it out.
I work on a live service video game, where we’re constantly releasing updates and new content. But our release pipeline length means new code doesn’t go live until it has been under test for at least a couple months. Because if someone finds a bug, there’s turnaround time to get it fixed, submitted, built, and re-tested, looking for any potential new issues that were introduced with the fix. That’s for a GAME. The idea that they might implement a verification system for MILLIONS of voters across MULTIPLE STATES and only have four days to test it before going live is horrifying.
ah, well, voting is also a GAME to fascists.
The big benefit of mail in voting is that I don’t need to prepare in advance of going to the polls, or stand in a big line. I can sit down with my ballot at the kitchen table and read about issues or candidates as I fill it in. Once I’ve finished at my leisure, I take the ballot sealed in the return envelope and drop it off at a nearby polling place - most libraries are great for this and have drop boxes at the ready for a few weeks leading up to Election Day.
Even if I procrastinate to the last minute I can drop the sealed ballot at an in-person polling place on Election Day without waiting in the big line. Mail-in voting is still excellent even if you cut USPS out of the picture for the return portion. Maybe better to call it Mail-Out Voting and make that the standard.
Unless you’re out of state on deployment. Good luck getting Hegseth’s military to deliver any ballots.
Hard agree with loving the vote-by-mail process, especially given the complexity of California ballots. But it sounds like they’re messing with getting our ballots mailed out to us in the first place. That means we would have to show up and vote a provisional ballot in person. Blargh.
State could sue but not until the harm was done.
Hmm, I guess you’re right. I guess I expected it to be on the return trip so that voters think they were successful and don’t follow up.
If everyone is forced to vote provisionally, then not only will turnout be low, there will all sorts of further lies about how the provisional process is fraudulent.
I believe you can print at home. This is how it works in WA and I’ve heard CA has a similar deal. There’s no need to use the postal service at all.
That’s exactly the same for me. My ballot gets tracked from pick up to counting, and I can view my voting history online anytime.
There will be so many lawsuits over purposely caused issues and other crises by November, the court will cancel it all and maga will say it’s just like Zelenskyy did so it’s fine. Two months to see if wrong!
If we’re not facing an active, actual, missiles-in-the-air, tanks-on-the-border invasion and they try to pull that shit, then they’re even dumber than I thought.
I’m more worried they’ll invoke FDR saying he did it and was considered a generally great president
… judge last week froze the mandates that the states use the system if they want USPS to deliver their ballots, but said USPS could still offer the portal to states that voluntarily want to upload the mail voter information. The Justice Department is appealing that ruling.
… USPS leadership was dismissive of concerns, and, according to the report “insisted that it was easy to understand what was needed and also that there was no time to write down the requirements.”
… When election officials bring ballots to their USPS site for delivery, either the entire batch of ballot envelopes or a sampling will be physically scanned – depending on where the ballots are being dropped, according to the whistleblower. If just a single ballot envelope scan does not align with the information in the portal, USPS will refuse to deliver the entire batch of ballots while the discrepancy is being sorted out.
Neat. I wonder whether they will even tell anyone when their ballots are invalidated.
Probably not. They don’t care, either way, as long as your valid ballot isn’t counted, they win. Vote in person, if you can.
Someone should mail all the postmasters and the inspectors a letter reminding them that the concept of qualified immunity doesn’t belong to them, that dear leader probably can’t even remember who the current postmaster general even is without being told, and that they are not insulated from the finding out.
What they’re going to do is “disappear” or delay mailed ballots based on the party the voter is registered as and/or their district and which way that district tends to vote. Not all of them, that would be too obvious. Just enough of them to tilt the election to the repubs.
Don’t vote by mail at all if you have any other choice. If you do have a mail-in ballot, hand-deliver it to the election center (the place you would go to vote early) in your city or failing that, drop it in a ballot box, NOT a PO Box. If you’re forced to do it by mail, mail it as soon as you possibly can, then I’m pretty sure there’s a way you can call and verify it was received at the election center.
But again, don’t vote by mail if at all possible. And if possible, go vote early rather than on Election Day–god only knows what they’ve got planned for that day. If you can, provide rides for people who need them so they can vote early too.
“Shit show” is too charitable a term for something that’s being sabotaged on purpose. How the fuck is it that people are still giving the Trump regime any sort of benefit of the doubt?!
It’s just the racists and people too stupid to see through the bullshit left supporting him. Unfortunately, that seems to be 1/3 of us.
Are ballots legally required to be handled by USPS? Is there any reason a state cannot contract out handling of ballots to UPS or FedEx?
If we look at the law, ballots don’t qualify as anything other than 1st class mail, which the USPS has a legal monopoly on.
It’s one of the handful of things that can actually get you in trouble with the postal marshals. They raided the credit reporting agencies at one point for sending credit reports via scheduled courier when they were neither time sensitive, heavy , expensive or short notice.
Well, ballots are clearly time sensitive. Reporting from 2020 claimed that UPS and FedEx can’t legally postmark ballots: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fedex-ballot-vote-mail-facts-190031449.html
But can states just declare that unnecessary? I mean, a lot of states have ballot drop boxes, so it’s not like USPS mail is the only alternative to in-person voting.
They’re not time sensitive in the sense that the first class monopoly law means.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/39/320.6
The delivery window needs to be measured in hours for it to qualify.
As for the postmark requirement, that would entirely depend on the state. Usually the law is written in such a way that it’s dropbox, hand it to clerk, or received by postal service. The postmark requirement is because it’s usually not permitted to give the ballot to someone outside of your home, but the postal service is an exception because they’re part of the government. There’s no provision in the law for accepting the word of a parcel service for when they got a ballot.
States could change that but they’d run into the first class mail restriction.
The best bet would be to permit a “moving drop box” where a municipal clerk could bring the box to your house. Make it like an ice cream truck playing patriotic music.Fuck it. Pull a Trump. Do it anyway and make them sue or come after you for it. Boot up a state-backed volunteer-run ballot delivering operation. Encourage people to pick up their ballots at county courthouses or other similar locations. For those who can’t make it, have a portal where a volunteer can drive a ballot out to them. Same for picking the ballots back up.
If they want to litigate it, tie them up in court long enough that it won’t matter. You already have the ballots at that point.
Oh, every single one of those is legal except paying anyone else, like UPS, to do it.
I don’t want them to do that one in specific because it gives them actual, as opposed to pretextual, justification to send postal marshals to raid and seize mail in ballots.
Sueing a secretary of state is fine, but an excuse to legally seize ballots would have immediate consequences on the election beyond what a lawsuit would.
Voting in person isn’t much better when those machines are owned by musk and other far right extremist oligarchs. I seriously doubt the results of the last election. I don’t think we can not vote by mail where I live anymore. I trust the mail in ballots more than these shadowy voting machines
This is why I hand-delivered mine to a ballot drop-box instead of mailing it. I do not fucking trust the USPS to handle my election materials anymore.
Unfortunately that is the point. Even if they don’t do anything, they have already undermined the public trust which will probably already disenfranchise many voters.
I haven’t had faith in the USPS’s handling of election materials since orangeboi appointed DeJoy as postmaster general right before the 2020 election, with the express purpose of trying to fuck with the election. There’s a new postmaster general (David Steiner), and by all accounts he’s even worse than DeJoy.
They’re talking about the mailing out of the ballots. You won’t get a ballot to fill out unless you live in a state where you can print your own.
