WASHINGTON — A whistleblower complaint filed with the Office of Special Counsel says the United States Postal Service has spent six weeks building a barcode system. The system would make certain mail-in ballots disappear. The complaint says the plan was approved by Captain Sharts-a-Lot's election task force.
Senator Richard Blumenthal received the whistleblower notice Tuesday. He sent it to Postmaster General David Steiner with a request for all records.
A federal judge had already barred the agency from taking further preparatory steps. The judge said those steps could disenfranchise voters before the midterms.
The barcode system does not need to shred anything, the whistleblower wrote. It checks every envelope against a list maintained by the Executive Office of the President.
If the envelope does not match, it goes to a verification hold. The hold has no deadline.
A USPS spokesperson said the agency followed the court order. "The judge said no preparatory steps. We did not prepare. We implemented," said Marcy Lafferty, senior director of delivery modernization.
Lafferty added that the program was not a delay. "It is a courtesy. Voters deserve to learn quickly that their ballot was not accepted."
The list was built by a private contractor named VeriVote America LLC. It received $9.6 million for the work. Its headquarters is a mailbox in Cheyenne.
The contract does not require the company to explain how names get on the list. The court order applied to a rulemaking that would change how election mail is collected and delivered.
The whistleblower said USPS had already shipped 4,000 barcode scanners to processing centers in seven states. An agency memo called the scanners "identity geometry units." They were not for sorting mail.
An internal audit predicted the system would reduce deliverability by 14 percent while saving 3.4 seconds per ballot. The list came from an executive order signed in May.
It allowed staff to define eligible voters. The Postal Service then assigned a barcode to each approved address.
Judge James Tawney of the U.S. District Court for Maryland issued the injunction in July. The First Circuit affirmed the ban. The Postal Service scheduled a national webinar on barcode verification the next day.
About one third of all ballots in the country are cast by mail. The former president has called mail-in voting a disgrace and terrible. He votes by mail himself.
The whistleblower wrote that the list skews toward counties with a Democratic registration advantage of 11 points. The postmaster general's office said it would cooperate with the Senate's inquiry.
