- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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.
That’s how it’s supposed to be. Unfortunately, that is not how it is right now. To even try to restore those states rights, will take the courts. And even if the courts are willing to do their jobs properly, the process would take years and we’d be lucky to see it resolved before the 2028 elections.
This is Trump’s modus operandi. Fuck shit up and when the courts try to sort it out, drag things out as long as possible so that by the time a decision is made, you’ve already done whatever you wanted to do in the first place.
Bottom line. Don’t vote by mail because your vote will not be counted that way.
Edit to clarify their plan:
When you request a ballot for mail in voting, election officials mail it to you. The USPS plan is the hold up ballots before they are delivered to voters. If even one ballot is addressed to a voter/address that doesn’t exactly match the USPS list of allowed voters, then the whole batch will be held up until they sort out the error. That sorting out will not doubt not be completed in time for you to get your ballot and fill it out.
Don’t mail your ballot back. Do vote by mail, and hand deliver your ballot to an official ballot drop box.
No. That is not a solution. The USPS plan is to not deliver your ballot to you when you request it.
Emphasis mine. You can request a ballot, but there is every possibility that the ballot will never be delivered for you to fill out. Early voting is going to be a much more reliable way to insure that your vote has a chance of being counted.
That’s why in CA, OR, and WA you can print out your ballot yourself. Fuck DeJoy with a rusty crowbar.
That’s a great option. I wasn’t aware of that.
Just selectively quoting for the purposes of humor.
Fucking fascists with rusty crowbars is always an option.
/s
Yes, Cascadia prepared for this.
Any idea what the plans are in Colorado? Yeah, printing it out would be the best option.
Still get to fill it out at my leisure and drop off at my leisure, with no concern for harassment by some Marklar douche or their ICE buddies. No lines. No stress trying to remember what to fill out or take a crib sheet, etc.
Also - very convenient and I love telling the Marklars in other states that Colorado has been voting by mail for a very long time and I never stand in lines. They hate to hear it. They want voting to be a chore, especially for people that live in the “wrong” areas. :)
Nope, sorry. I only know about CA as a resident, and the other two because I’ve seen them talking about it.
Holy shit thank you for pointing that out. I’d personally recommend swapping out the rusty crowbar for rusty barbed wire, but that’s just me.
The Democratic Party needs to be broadcasting that option from the hilltops.
When it comes to Colorado, so far, it doesn’t seem like we have the option. At least not yet. They did give us an additional SEVEN days for voting, because everyone can see what kind of fuckery donnie and the cons are up to.
https://www.denverpost.com/2026/06/02/colorado-elections-voting-jared-polis-law-trump/
Also, this might be where they have allowed for some emergency decisions that would permit us to print our ballots.
Absolutely this ! Do not trust the mail anymore.
I stopped trusting the mail for anything politicial ever since I participated in a postcard campaign for the 2024 election. I wrote a bunch of postcards to hundreds of people to remind them to vote, and I decided to write a few to my friends and family to verify that they were sent out. I stamped them, dropped them in the mailbox to be sent out on the day I was instructed to, and the 2024 election rolls around. I followed up with my friends and family to see if they got their postcards.
Not a single one received them.
Something undoubtedly fucky happened with the mail in 2024.
Part of the conservative plot is to erode trust in government anything. Then they can dismantle it and sell it off for parts to the private sector.
Education and the postal service are square in their targets and have been for decades. Same with things like Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid. Right now, they are stoking intergenerational conflict aimed at “boomers” with claims like they are “too entitled”, there are “too many old people”, and so on. Mark my words, that will be one of the drumbeats to take it away, put it into the stock market (or donnie’s crypto schemes). And it’s not like boomers will be the only ones affected, of course…
That’s why I’ve been saying that 2020 is likely the last free election this country ever had. Tons of pedo-fuckery happened in 2024 they’d made it their absolute goal to make voting nothing more than a symbolic gesture.
Fuck. All. Of. Them.
This was the goal all along. If the mail isn’t trustworthy, then there’s no reason to keep it around as a service. So we can get rid of it by transferring it to the highest
briberbidder.Please see my previous post. By requesting a mail ballot, you are already trusting the USPS to get that ballot to you. Their plan is to disrupt this part of the process. They will be flagging whole batches of ballots when the election officials send them out, and they will hold up whole batches if even a single ballot recipient in a batch doesn’t exactly match their list of registered voters.
I can’t because the USPS refuses to deliver it. :)
If they don’t send you the mail-in, you can still vote, can’t you?
My state is 100% mail in ballots.
Oh fuck well that’s problematic - sorry I completely forgot
Probably, but it depends where you live how that will go.
Provisional ballots are a whole other shit show. Republicans have repeatedly tried to invalidate provisional ballots cast in previous elections. If at all possible, early voting is probably a better option.
It’s in the fucking Constitution. There’s no question here. Six Justices are traitors.
This will not be resolved by voting alone. (Edited for @[email protected])
Voting has a much better chance of resolving this than not voting does. Voting is not perfect, but it’s what we’ve got. Stop discouraging people from casting their vote.
I am doing no such thing. Of course vote. You must. It is a necessary part of the resolution. But by itself, it falls short of a complete resolution.
Move fast, break things.
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.
One can dream, Nurnberg trial for the whole administration
God I hope the timeline pans out that way :|
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.
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.