US president Donald Trump.
A whistleblower has warned that a new US Postal Service (USPS) system being developed to implement president Donald Trump’s mail voting order could disrupt ballot deliveries to millions of Americans, raising fresh concerns over the timing and reliability of the system ahead of the November midterm elections. The disclosure, released on Tuesday by Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal, alleges that USPS has been developing the federal ballot mail portal at speed and with limited testing, despite an ongoing legal battle over Trump’s executive order.
“The apparently sloppy and rushed manner in which the federal ballot mail portal and supporting IT systems are being built poses significant risk,” the whistleblower said, according to news agency AFP. “Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,” the official added. Under the proposed system, states would upload lists of voters receiving mail ballots along with identifying barcodes to a new federal portal. Postal workers would then check samples from ballot batches against the information before accepting them for delivery. Blumenthal, the senior Democrat on a Senate investigations panel, accused the Postal Service of risking voters’ access to the ballot and called on Postmaster General David Steiner to abandon the plan.