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Whistleblower warns Postal Service mail ballot system has catastrophic problems
- ck2 1mo agogood thing it's completely illegal for the federal government to interfere with state voting proceedure > For instance, the Postal Service has what the whistleblower claims is a "zero percent failure rate." > Mail workers would scan a sample of a batch of mail ballots — about 400 out of a batch of 10,000 or more — to verify it matches what is in the federal mail ballot portal. > Under the policy, if even one barcode on a single ballot in the batch doesn't scan properly or the information does not match, the entire batch would be rejected and returned to state election officials so the problem ballot could be addressed, and then the verification process would have to be started again.
- downrightmike 1mo agoThat sample is wrong for statistics, 4% is literally not significant. It's also too much for sample controls
- mafuy 1mo agoThis is not the job of the postal service, but of the government. There is zero reason to outsource verification, and the postal service ought to vehemently reject this attempt to shift responsibility. Though I guess they won't, seeing as they are gleichgeschaltet.
- mcmcmc 1mo agoYou realize USPS is the government right? It’s literally in the Constitution
- Terr_ 1mo ago> USPS is the government The wrong government! Voter rolls etc. are state responsibilities, not a federal ones. And please, don't spend a second entertaining any crocodile-tears and pearl-clutching from Republicans about how "maybe states don't have rights and need consistent standards" all of a sudden. Nobody with any good-intentions for reform would wait until right before a major election to do something crazy that could disenfranchise millions. Ex: "Stop being so mean to Bob, he just wanted to help out with platform stability when he stole that SSH key to push an un-reviewed hotfix to prod while betting the company stock would crash on a gambling site."
- jibal 1mo agoFallacy of composition. It would be factual to say that the USPS is part of the federal government, but then the statement becomes completely irrelevant. And no, the USPS is not in the Constitution. Article I Section 8 gives Congress the power "To establish Post Offices and post Roads". They executed that power via legislation. The USPS didn't come into being until 1970, replacing the United States Post Office Department, a branch of the cabinet. The legislation creating the USPS says that it "shall not make any undue or unreasonable discrimination among users of the mails" -- what Trump has tasked it to do is in direct violation of that law.
- grim_io 1mo agoAssuming they check 400 out of 10k, and assuming someone would want to cause any meaningful discrepancies >= 1% of the ballots, meaning 100 problematic ballots per 10k batch. This system would catch it 98,3% of the time. Pretty good, I'd say.
- tenuousemphasis 1mo agoOk now what's the potential false positive rate?
- peterleiser 1mo ago1 million ballots at 10,000 per batch means 100 batches. It seems they will use 400 ballots from each batch as a sample, and if anything is wrong for one of those 400 sample ballots, then the entire batch of 10,000 is sent back. Some nefarious actor could find 100 messed up ballots and include one in each sample of 400, and viola! 100 ballots invalidates 1 million votes. That's quite a system they got there.
- grim_io 1mo agoMaybe I'm stupid, but why would sending back mean invalid? It gets sent back, it gets investigated and fixed, and back it goes. Am I missing something?
- snypher 1mo agoEveryone wants a winner on the day, and if the votes are pushed back it goes into 'hanging chad' time, which some appointed judge can just decide if the votes are included / the winner.
- dpkirchner 1mo agoI'd wager most of us are OK with it taking a few days. There's a (relative) few weirdos that get upset if they see the numbers change as votes continue to be tallied.
- Jordan-117 1mo agoThey don't care if it's illegal. They'll do it anyway and trust in the tainted result being a fait accompli that the courts can't (or won't) resolve.
- gWPVhyxPHqvk 1mo agoIt's still funny thinking that there's people out there in 2026 who think that "it's illegal" will stop the Trump administration.
- BigTTYGothGF 1mo ago> good thing it's completely illegal for the federal government to interfere with state voting proceedure Oh yeah that'll stop them.
- hackyhacky 1mo ago> Postal Service mail ballot system has catastrophic problems Yes. That's the point. The administration doesn't care about fixing whatever hypothetical mail ballot fraud may or may not exist; they are doing this to inject chaos into the election results, giving them cover to claim any result they want or even to just throw out the results entirely. Catastrophic problems are the means to that end.
- RickJWagner 1mo ago[flagged]
- Geeek 1mo agoOne can observe and accuse based on that observation. What 'sources' do you expect to see?
- RickJWagner 1mo ago[flagged]
- throwawayqqq11 1mo agoSo you would like to see a real source of the stated/recorded democracy subversion goal of the GOP? If they didnt state it, its fake news? Until then, all the past events, from court packing, gerry-mandering to now mail-in ballots (etc pp) is just coincidence? When trump says "we only need to win once" and then conducts blantant corruption and demolishes institutions/relationships, you think this is just one more isolated coincindence? You think he will leave the white house easily and face the charges, even though his ball room isnt done? Another commenter noted, how many people seem to live in absolute disinformation bubbles, in your case, i would add "state of insane denial".
- LastTrain 1mo agoHe’s just demanding the same kind of rigor he demands from Trump about rigged elections. Here you go RickWagoner the Republican Governor of famously liberal Wyoming smells something fishy too: https://www.codyenterprise.com/news/local/article_7f688e37-342c-457a-8a1f-aea2a471a0e8.html https://www.codyenterprise.com/news/local/article_7f688e37-3...
- nedo_var 1mo ago[dead]
- SoftTalker 1mo ago[flagged]
- torben-friis 1mo agoI'm not American, but if I'm not mistaken, you don't have election day off like in other countries, right? If so, how is that not clearly discriminatory for those who can't afford the time to go.
- Arubis 1mo agoWe have a designated Election Day. It is (as you correctly imply) not a federal holiday. My own perspective is that that is indeed clearly discriminatory, and that some people like it that way.
- fhdkweig 1mo agoIt is not a paid holiday. It isn't an unpaid holiday either. And if you work a minimum wage job, you probably need to work as many hours as you can. And if you don't show up to work on Tuesday, don't bother showing up on Wednesday because you don't have that job anymore. This is absolutely discriminatory against the poor. That's why the republicans fight for these types of restrictions and democrats fight against them.
- gortok 1mo agoNo, Election Day is not a paid holiday, or even a recognized holiday. Public schools are generally out (at least the ones used as voting precints) but folks have work, and typically most "in person" votes are cast after 5pm (after folks traditionally leave work). Mail in voting has been something that the elderly, infirmed, workers, and folks in the military have done for decades. It's remarkably secure and quite auditable. The issue the right has with it is that the folks that vote by mail (the military notwithstanding) are typically democrats.
- mcmcmc 1mo ago> Mail in voting has been something that the elderly, infirmed, workers, and folks in the military have done for decades. Very common for college students who go to school out of state as well. A conspicuously blue voting bloc.
- thataccount 1mo ago[flagged]
- wat10000 1mo agoYour vague handwavey manner of writing sounds very presidential.
- thataccount 1mo agoIt's actually very specific. Look up the previous abuses of the US Postal Inspections Bureau and you will see exactly what I mean and why I've said it the way I've said it.
- solid_fuel 1mo ago“It’s very specific” “Just look up vague abuses that I’m claiming happened with no evidence”
- thataccount 1mo ago>https://www.yahoo.com/news/the-postal-service-is-running-a-running-a-covert-operations-program-that-monitors-americans-social-media-posts-160022919.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/the-postal-service-is-running-a-r... Here is one instance among many.
- CamperBob2 1mo agoWhat does that have to do with anything discussed here? Wait'll you hear about the Comstock Act and what the USPS has done to enforce that.
- thataccount 1mo ago[flagged]
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- MithrilTuxedo 1mo agoWhat business is it of the USPS except to transmit all mail regardless of purpose? The fact that the USPS would notice elections were being conducted is perverse.
- testfoobar 1mo agoYes - USPS should behave like a layer 3 network: moving mail pieces to destination addresses independent of source & destination. Where elections probably matter to postal services is that they represent a particular shape of mail volume and network usage that may require management to reorganize pickup/delivery resources to meet delivery commitments.
- wallst07 1mo agoSo like spam mail, but much less volume?
- 0xbadcafebee 1mo agoYou're missing the bigger picture. New Mail Voting Rules Moved Forward Despite USPS Officials’ Concerns About Mass Disenfranchisement (https://www.propublica.org/article/mail-voting-usps-officials-concerns-disenfranchisement https://www.propublica.org/article/mail-voting-usps-official...) In a March executive order, President Donald Trump directed the Postal Service to create the new rules, including requiring states to give USPS a list of all voters eligible to receive a ballot in the mail and requiring USPS to use those lists to determine which ballots get sent to voters. USPS officials were tasked with crafting the details of how the new system would work, including the creation of a new portal for states to upload their voters’ information and the back-end software that would allow mail delivery sites and local post offices to track, and potentially block, ballots entering into the mail on their way to voters. The whistleblower is saying the rules are crafted so certain people don't get counted. Specifically, minorities, specifically, democrat minorities.
- beanjuiceII 1mo ago[flagged]
- cogman10 1mo agoRegardless what anyone thinks about the security of voting in the US. I'd hope that they could see how massively upending multiple states' voting systems 2 months before the midterms is a really bad idea. Even with the best intentions, implementing such a sweeping untested change so rapidly is a horrible idea. (No, I don't support it regardless, but surely even if you do you could recognize that the timeframe is way too short).
- Terr_ 1mo agoTo go beyond the understatement of "bad idea" (and likely make the subtext into text): This thing is unmistakable malice, not mere incompetence. There's no "oops I didn't know" or "oops I timed the project wrong" or "oops I forgot about the election deadline" or "oops nobody told me about the court-order prohibiting it", etc.
- llm_nerd 1mo agoThere is something incredibly cancerous when a certain party abhors democracy, and does everything they can to undermine the voting rights or access to groups they think won't vote for them. I would expect most Americans would see this as grotesquely anti-American, and absolutely against the principals of the country. Instead it barely makes news and is just another "get whatever advantage you can" tactic.
- majormajor 1mo ago"Abhors democracy" isn't necessarily the right phrase for the on-the-ground majority. The leadership, sure. But not the average folk. "Has such a small imagination that they can't imagine they wouldn't be the majority" is more like it. For all the old fears of "we need the senate so big cities don't run the country" they have a massive blind spot of there being less diversity of thought, and more of a monoculture, in suburban and rural areas. And they don't realize that because of this they shouldn't be surprised if not everyone agrees with them.
- FireBeyond 1mo ago
- s5300 1mo ago[dead]
- someothherguyy 1mo agovoting by mail is pretty popular these days https://electionlab.mit.edu/research/voting-mail-and-absentee-voting https://electionlab.mit.edu/research/voting-mail-and-absente... more controversy: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/25/us/mail-in-voting-states.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/25/us/mail-in-voting-states.... https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/31/us/politics/postal-service-mail-ballots-delays-midterms-voting.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/31/us/politics/postal-servic... https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/02/us/politics/postal-service-ballot-screening-system.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/02/us/politics/postal-servic...
- gradus_ad 1mo ago[flagged]
- sethherr 1mo agoThen it’s necessary to make voting a federal holiday. Like it is in other countries.
- folkrav 1mo agoWe don't have holidays here, but employers are required to provide us with a certain amount of consecutive free hours (which specific number I can't remember) inside voting hours.
- sethherr 1mo agoThat’s fine, except for places in the US (particularly poor urban areas) where you have to wait in line for hours and hours to vote - it would need to accommodate for that
- folkrav 1mo agoThe fact it takes hours upon hours is a problem in an of itself, it probably acts as a deterrent to vote for many. I just checked, in Canada it's 3 mandatory consecutive hours without docking pay or other penalities.
- tstrimple 1mo agoIt’s an intentionally designed problem in blue cities that exist in red states. Constant ratfuckery by republicans influencing polling locations.
- trimethylpurine 1mo agoI don't think there is any federal law. Could be a law in your state.
- UltraSane 1mo ago[flagged]
- skybrian 1mo agoI'm wondering how easy the USPS is to route around. In California's last election, there were 2,758 drop-box locations and 3,546 polling locations. In cities, these are often within walking distance. In rural areas, they might not be so convenient. So it seems like, at least for returning ballots, any USPS snafus would affect rural voters (which skew Republican) more than urban? Delivering is another question. I wonder if local governments could drop off ballots if they needed to?
- hyperhello 1mo agoNo, the procedures are designed to reject more votes in blue areas, just like the procedures that somehow conclude that people named Williams, John, or Washington should be dropped from the rolls for being similarly named as other people named Williams, John, or Washington.
- skybrian 1mo agoBut suppose there are states that don't cooperate with that?
- beanjuiceII 1mo agothe procedurse are not designed to reject more votes in blue areas lol being involved at the organization forr 15+ years its always so funny to hear what ppl on this site cook up; i get a good 'what are they saying now on orange site' with my co-workers
- linuxhansl 1mo ago> The United States Postal Service has spent months developing a U.S. Federal Ballot Mail Portal to provide election officials with a simple, secure, and efficient way to share lists of individuals receiving ballots by mail in their respective states. Why? Your job is to transfer pieces of mail from one place to another. Just continue that. Everything else is manufacturing a problem where there was none. Edit: Spelling.
- leptons 1mo ago>Everything else is manufacturing a problem where there was none. That's this administrations exact intended purpose for forcing this.
- cobertos 1mo agoTheir job is whatever the government tells them it is, things like this don't just spawn out of thin air, there's usually rationale for it[0]. The post office already does way more than you think it does. Like identity verification on behalf of the government and tracking which houses are considered "vacant" or not. It would be nice to focus the USPS, but all these extra services have to be done by _some entity_, otherwise you can't have the final result. In this case, the result is a functional, auditable mail in ballot system [0]: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/06/02/2026-10968/ballot-mail-for-federal-elections https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/06/02/2026-10...
- wallst07 1mo ago"Their job is whatever the government tells them it is" Sounds like authoritarianism.
- rg2004 1mo agoGiven that they are dedicated to causing chaos in the midterms, how is it best countered? Whisper campaigns to tell all your friends to vote in person? When he loses, what stops him from putting troops in the streets? Is the recourse just wait until he goes? We all see what's happening, how do we meet the moment?
- hiddencost 1mo agoI'm skeptical that the federal government can be saved. I suspect we will experience a process of balkanization.
- rf15 1mo agoSince everybody voted for Trump again, he just won't have a choice but to take a third term. It's what the people want! /s Cue civil war?
- jongjong 1mo agoVoting doesn't work in a low-trust society. You can't trust the custodian of the digital system who tallies the votes. The problem is intractable. The president, who is ultimately decided by the custodians of the voting system, is not going to order an audit of the voting system which made them president in the first place as that would paradoxically cast doubt on the president's own legitimacy. The incentives are firmly against this. And look at the primaries; absolutely rigged. Nobody with power is asking for any audit...
- Arodex 1mo agoWhy is Mike Lindell broke now? Because he tried to prove voter fraud and failed miserably. He spent millions. >And look at the primaries; absolutely rigged. Any proof? Oh, right, "vibes".
- Hobadee 1mo ago[flagged]
- hackyhacky 1mo ago> Our elections are beyond broken and untrustworthy. You assert this without evidence. People have spent years looking for evidence of widespread voter fraud without success [1]. > voting should have a barrier to entry. Your freedoms are important - people died for them. That's not how rights work. Would you say that there should be a "barrier to entry" for freedom of speech or gun rights? They added a "barrier to entry" for voting after the civil war and it didn't go so well. [2] [1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/disbanded-trumps-voter-fraud-commission https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/disb... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test
- Hobadee 1mo ago> You assert this without evidence. I mean, there are plenty of instances if you are willing to look... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cases_of_electoral_fraud_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cases_of_electoral_fra... Hackers rather trivially were able to hack optical scan machines back in the 90s or early 2000s. Defcon famously has its voting village, where hackers hack voting machines via numerous means. If you think this isn't happening (or at least being attempted) in reality (by either party, and/or outside countries) you are naive. > That's not how rights work. Would you say that there should be a "barrier to entry" for freedom of speech or gun rights? Yes, there is a barrier of entry for freedom of speech and gun rights; it's called holding on to freedom itself, and it is a VERY difficult and bloody ordeal that can be lost extremely quickly if not protected. (See all non-free countries, or even parts of Europe where you can now be jailed for making certain comments online.) I never said the barrier for entry should be a test, like the "literacy tests" we implemented during Jim Crow, but if you aren't willing to give up something for your freedom, you probably don't deserve it. (Not saying you must necessarily give something up, just that you must be willing to give something up.)
- 1mo ago
- arjie 1mo agoConsidering a mail-in ballot gets rid of ballot secrecy anyway, I don't see why they don't just allow online ballots cast with login.gov or whatever.
- tumult 1mo agoMail in ballots don’t get rid of secrecy, unless the system has been tampered with, which you could also do with illegal cameras at in-person voting etc. Anonymous envelope-within-envelope is a pretty standard way to keep secrecy, and many states do it, like mine.
- eagleal 1mo ago> Mail in ballots don’t get rid of secrecy They mean voter buying cases, "paying you to confirm a vote for X" and see you check the card. In ballot cabins the buyer can't come with you inside the booth to confirm, so your vote has verifiable privacy/secrecy. It doesn't really solve all type of vote buying problems (like clientelism lists, etc), but removes that confirmation step.
- Paradigma11 1mo agoIs that really a problem? Since there will be lots of evidence and criminals tend to fuck up quite a bit this should be well documented. Unless you think that those election fraudsters that buy tons of votes from civilians have better opsec than drug dealers and the like.
- earth-tattoo 1mo ago[flagged]
- samstokes 1mo agoThis is misleading. It's true that you get a ballot, but it's a provisional ballot. Your eligibility to vote gets checked during the counting process. The process is described on the same website you linked to: https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voter-registration/same-day-reg https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voter-registration/same-day...
- earth-tattoo 1mo ago1. Why send ballots until verified. 2. There's no document verification. Anybody can enter someone's name and social security number and get a ballot delivered anywhere. 3. I still don't trust the ballot gets thrown out if there's a mismatch. In order to be 100% safe, there should be only in person voting with a voter id. Anything else is open to abuse.
- dboreham 1mo agoDisinformation.
- earth-tattoo 1mo agoNo.
- sph 1mo ago> One third of all Americans cast their ballots by mail Damn, never thought it was this much! I thought postal voting was mostly for people living abroad and less-abled ones that couldn’t physically go to a voting station. Is this common in other countries?
- massenpunkt 1mo agoYes, completely normal here in Switzerland. Approx. 90% vote by mail here [1]. [1]: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/how-the-world-s-most-frequent-voters-handle-postal-ballots/46070666 https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/how-the-world-s-most-f...
- sph 1mo agoDon’t you guys have many more referendums than other countries by nature of your direct democracy? At that point streamlining the process becomes crucial.
- massenpunkt 1mo agoYes, that's true, and we go to the polls on average four to five times per year. Indeed, this leads to making the process lean and efficient. However, this trusted process too is under pressure to change. Recently, voting via internet has been discussed, which could potentially undermine its trustworthiness.
- Arodex 1mo agoVoting by mail is, in the absolute, a bad idea, not because of fraud but because it enables vote buying: you can show someone who you are voting for, and thus receive a bribe for it. The "normal" way of voting in a booth removes that verification step and makes vote buying a fool's errand. Hopefully, in a twisted way, the fact AI enables convincing fake pictures and videos makes this vote buying scheme unpractical now, but it was a vector of attack until very recently, especially with encrypted communication and cryptocurrencies.
- IndySun 1mo agoIf a name and the address associated 'votes', how long before that initial vote is noted in the system? I'm assuming a situation in which there's fake slips out there, or a subsequent digital vote comes in. When is the discrepancy flagged?
- chrisjj 1mo agoTrue title: Whistleblower warns Postal Service's new mail ballot system has "potentially catastrophic problems"
- holgerschurig 1mo agoThe very sad state of the US democracy, especially how they do elections, was even fodder to a german language book "König von Deutschland" (King of Germany) by Andreas Eschbach. In the fictive story, it is the year 2000. Some get the job to write a software to manipulate vote computers. Later, the same programmer was asked to manipulate also voting computers in Germany. This time, he tries to resist. They create a joke-party for the re-erification of the Monarchy and manipulate the vote computers so that this joke-party gets the majority. And that works. But no one believes him that the computers were manipulated and he really gets to be the new king of Germany. That's all very fictive ... it's just that in the text you have lots of footnotes giving reference to ACTUAL problem with US voting devices ... Also: in Germany the Chaos Computer Club once demonstrated that they could run chess on an already "certified to be safe for election" voting computer. That brought the end to these devices ... so now Germany is back to a state where your Aunt Mary can sit down with the paper ballot sheets, can recount and can inform herself that everything was right. Without the need of a CS degree, without knowledge about IT security, hacking, etc. Which is IMHO a general win to the democracy. Lay people must be able to verify results!
- smitty1e 1mo agoStipulating that the article is bollocks, you still have no guarantee that a ballot was marked without coercion applied to the voter. This is why as much voting in person; on election day; at a polling place; behind a privacy screen; as possible is generally recommended.
- specialist 1mo agoChange (chaos) is the biggest threat to election integrity. It creates "jump ball" situations where anything can happen. Last minute rule changes: redistricting, ballot redesign / reissue, gear swaps, polling locations, etc. Way bigger than electronic voting, which is what initially motivated by activism. Source: am a recovering election integrity activist.
- econ 1mo agoOT: I solve the election puzzle: Have anonymized, legally binding election programs. The voter gets two randomly selected programs. Basically bubble sort but with up and down vote counters. You spend 30 minutes in the boot before voting and get paid for your time.