good 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.
This 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.
You realize USPS is the government right? It’s literally in the Constitution
> 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."
Fallacy 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.
They 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.
> good thing it's completely illegal for the federal government to interfere with state voting proceedure
Oh yeah that'll stop them.
It's still funny thinking that there's people out there in 2026 who think that "it's illegal" will stop the Trump administration.
That sample is wrong for statistics, 4% is literally not significant. It's also too much for sample controls
No one ever accused this administration of being competent.
maybe so, but it is very vocal about they are the most modest
Assuming 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.
Ok now what's the potential false positive rate?
1 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.
Maybe 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?
No, the verification they're doing is on the sending side, not receiving. The state sends people ballots, the USPS intercepts them and sends them back to the state if they find an issue.
IF this cycle of delays lasts long enough, then some people never receive a mail-in ballot, or receive it too late
Everyone 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.
I'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.
They only tested 400 out of 10,000, so there’s every chance when it goes back there’ll be another reason to reject it. You’re also assuming that the government’s data is accurate and the rejections are not disingenuous. If the ballots were actually accurate the state now needs to go through the process of proving that particular voter is eligible. Do state elections departments have the time and manpower to do all of that for however many get rejected? The goal is clearly to waste as much time as possible so the ballots don’t arrive on time.