- 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.
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
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.
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.
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.