While a federal judge kept a block on the mandatory core of Trump’s mail-ballot rule in place just yesterday, a whistleblower revealed that the Postal Service was forging ahead with constructing the mail portal that Trump hopes to use to reject mail-in ballots, defying that same judge’s earlier order halting the work.
The New York Times has the story:
The official at the Postal Service, describing their work on the portal in the whistle-blower report, raised “grave concerns” that the portal’s verification process could reject tens of thousands of ballots in a bulk-mailing batch if “even one bar code on one single ballot” failed to properly scan, and that the rushed, “slapdash” development of the portal would significantly increase the chance of errors and other failures in the verification process.
“Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,” the official said in the report, which was prepared with the assistance of Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit group that represents people seeking to expose potential lawbreaking. … In the whistle-blower report, the federal official raised concerns that the Postal Service had violated several court orders that should have halted work on the new system. At one point in June, the report said, work on the project was halted in response to a court order. But a month later, the project was “suddenly resumed without explanation of what authority permitted U.S.P.S. to ignore the court order.”
Our own Andy Craig has written in more detail about the proposed rule, its legal status, and its implications for election integrity. While the Supreme Court has not refused to bless Trump’s proposal, the administration is clearly hoping that it will one day—and has rushed to put the technological architecture in place for that eventuality.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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