By Tierney Sneed, CNN
(CNN) — 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.
“USPS leadership, it appears, has discarded all best practices as they speed the project to be ready for a September 1 implementation – raising questions about whether catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug,” said the report.
CNN has reached out to USPS for comment.
Trump signed an executive order in March that gave the USPS an unprecedented role in screening states’ mail ballot programs. Election officials have already expressed deep concerns about having to use a system that has not gone through extensive testing and training procedures
Internally, according to the whistleblower, USPS’ IT teams were going to be given less than a week to test the system once it was finished, due to the time crunch of the electoral calendar; North Carolina begins sending ballots this week and other states join it later this month.
It’s not clear whether the portal is ready to be launched on Tuesday, as was the goal, according to the whistleblower report. A judge last week froze the mandates that the states use the system if they want USPS to deliver their ballots, but said USPS could still offer the portal to states that voluntarily want to upload the mail voter information. The Justice Department is appealing that ruling.
Haphazard development and testing process
In the final week of testing, the phrase “sh*t show” was used by multiple people to describe the process, the whistleblower alleges in the report, which identifies other examples of USPS barreling through the process of creating the system. The plans the IT staff were shown for the system were “constantly changing” from the beginning, and systems’ requirements were not clearly put in writing for the development staff, the whistleblower says.
USPS leadership was dismissive of concerns, and, according to the report “insisted that it was easy to understand what was needed and also that there was no time to write down the requirements.”
The report describes a haphazard effort to test the parts of the system as they became ready. Under the timeline sketched out to meet the September 1 deadline, there would only be four days allotted for it to go through a stage in the development process in which potential users of the system can test it out.
“For a system that manages something as important as handling voting and ballots, 4 days of user testing is entirely unreasonable,” the whistleblower report said.
Verification procedures with no room for error
The concerns about the untested nature of the system are particularly acute because if there are any discrepancies between the voter lists that election officials have submitted and the ballots they’re seeking to send, USPS could reject the entire batches of ballots – meaning tens of thousands of ballots could go unsent at a time – until the discrepancy is fixed.
The whistleblower says that there will be a first round of verification – in a process not spelled out in the public regulations – comparing the voter information in the portal with “manifests” election officials must also submit for each batch of ballots they intend to drop off. The information on the manifests – including unique bar codes election officials are required, under the rules, to assign each voter – must match perfectly with the information in the portal before election officials are allowed drop off the ballots, the report says.
When election officials bring ballots to their USPS site for delivery, either the entire batch of ballot envelopes or a sampling will be physically scanned – depending on where the ballots are being dropped, according to the whistleblower. If just a single ballot envelope scan does not align with the information in the portal, USPS will refuse to deliver the entire batch of ballots while the discrepancy is being sorted out.
“As designed, the process is entirely unforgiving. It could delay ballots by the thousands in repeated verification cycles – and thus prevent states from mailing enormous numbers of ballots,” the report says.
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