Today, a quick rundown of the important-but-overlooked whistleblower complaint about Trump’s attempts to mess with your mail-in ballots. Plus some other items we’re tracking as the threats to the midterms continue apace. Also, check out my discussions on those threats with Scott Harris of WPKN, and Mike Sacks with Legal AF. Support us with a paid subscription or buy us a cup of coffee. Much more to come. - jg
Among the many threats to the midterm elections is a system being created by the USPS that will result in chaos for tens of millions of voters across the country who will vote by mail in November.
Many of those voters might not even receive their ballots if the Supreme Court allows the system to be fully implemented. Now, a USPS whistleblower says those inside the agency working on the system have called it a “shit show.”
The system requires states to provide a list of all people receiving mail-in ballots to the USPS. That list is checked against a second list of ballots — called a “manifest” — that contains voter information required to send the ballot: first and last name, address, etc. Only when the voter list and manifest match — perfectly — are election officials allowed to bring the ballots to a USPS facility to send them.
Then, there is a second check. If the scanning and processing system currently being created by the USPS flags any discrepancies between the list of voters receiving ballots and the corresponding information on the actual ballots — like an address change, or someone who has changed their name because they were married — then the ballot is flagged for rejection. But not just that ballot — every single other ballot in that batch, which can number in the tens of thousands of ballots.
This means that any minor technical discrepancy between a voters’ information on lists provided by states and their actual ballot would result not just in that individual ballot’s rejection, but every other ballot in the batch. In this way, tens of thousands of ballots at a time would have to go back to state election officials, who would then have to fix the lone error, and then re-submit the entire batch of ballots.
“As designed, the process is entirely unforgiving,” a USPS whistleblower wrote to Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) on Aug. 31. “It could delay ballots by the thousands in repeated verification cycles — and thus prevent states from mailing enormous numbers of ballots.”
Trump’s attempt to effectively stop millions of ballots from being sent to voters is just one of a dizzying number of ways that the president is directly interfering in November’s midterms on behalf of Republicans. Not on the ballot himself, Trump is nonetheless aggressively working to prevent Democrats from taking power in Congress, likely motivated by his fear of being impeached or otherwise held accountable for his and his administration’s rampant corruption and incompetence.
The Supreme Court has thus far avoided having to decide on the system at the center of the whistleblower’s letter, which stems from one of Trump’s executive orders on elections. But the court will likely decide on the matter before November. If the court approves Trump’s order and the USPS mail-in ballot system, it will throw the midterms further into chaos as states scramble to comply with the new system, and get ballots to voters on time. (In fact, some ballots like those to members of the military and overseas voters are already being sent out.)
The court may also choose to decide on a case being brought by the Republican National Committee that seeks to purge voters within the 90-day “quiet period” of the National Voter Registration Act. This 90-day window provided by the NVRA was created to ensure that large-scale voter purges — which are often the result of challenges brought by political parties and highly-partisan Republican activists — don’t disenfranchise voters close to an election. The RNC is arguing that because it believes (highly questionably) noncitizens are registered to vote in Arizona, the 90-day quiet period shouldn’t apply. If the Supreme Court decides in the RNC’s favor, it would pave the way for voter purges of voters with Hispanic last names in Arizona within months or weeks of the midterms.
These pending decisions by the Supreme Court are just two of the many, many ways that Trump and Republicans are seeking to interfere in the midterms. Here are a few other issues we’re tracking and ways to ensure your vote counts:
Not only is the DNC’s lawsuit against the Justice Department over plans to seize ballots a warning that Trump clearly plans to do just that, but it’s also an important move to thwart those efforts: The DOJ could try to seize ballots, even without a warrant, according to a retired federal judge who spoke to The American Prospect, but states couldn’t proactively obtain court injunctions against such actions unless we know that such a policy currently exists. The existence of that policy is exactly what the DNC lawsuit seeks to reveal. As of today, the DOJ has been served and has yet to respond.
It’s still entirely unclear what the Justice Department is doing with the thousands of ballots it took during an FBI raid of a Fulton County elections warehouse in Georgia in January. Speculation remains that the Trump administration will use the ballots to make further unfounded claims of fraud in the 2020 election, perhaps as pretext to declare a national emergency or invoke the Insurrection Act to take greater control of election administration in November.
After the Trump administration threatened to withhold federal election security funding to Democratic states that refused to implement Trump’s demands on election administration, Democrats are asking the Department of Homeland Security to explain a delay in funds to states involved with the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC).
Concerned over the pending USPS mail-in ballot chaos, Oregon will use more ballot drop boxes to allow voters to return their ballots.
Democrats across the country are urging voters to check their voter registration to ensure it’s up-to-date, with some saying it’s crucial that voters vote early and even in-person. Early in-person voting in Rhode Island’s primaries is already double what it was during the 2022 midterms.
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