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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.
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.