We need to get the word out: Do NOT use the USPS to vote in the midterms

This does not mean you can’t vote by mail. My understanding is that states that use vote by mail, either as the standard option as in Colorado and several other states, or as an alternative, whether for absentee voting or just in general, have drop boxes at polling places and elsewhere that allow mailed ballots to be deposited without using the USPS. And that’s a good thing because:

A new system to screen millions of mail-in ballots for this November’s US midterm elections was thrown together so hastily, and tested so little, that a single scanning glitch could see entire batches of ballots turned away, a whistleblower has told Congress.

The project – a key part of Donald Trump’s new restrictions on voting – is “perilously rushed and potentially unlawful”, according to the US senator Richard Blumenthal, who disclosed the warning in a letter to David Steiner, the postmaster general, on Tuesday.

Blumenthal, the top Democrat on the US Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations, said the account he had received made clear the US Postal Service “lacks the technical or operational capability” to roll it out safely before ballots go out to voters.

The system stems from a March executive order by Trump tightening federal control over mail-in voting, directing USPS to check ballots against a federally approved voter list before sending them – a break from its usual role of simply delivering whatever is handed over by states. Courts have blocked and unblocked parts of the order repeatedly since, amid lawsuits arguing it oversteps into territory the constitution leaves to states.

USPS calls the result the “Federal Ballot Mail Portal”. Officials upload voter and barcode data in advance; clerks then scan a sample of arriving ballots – 15 to 400, depending on batch size – against that list. According to the whistleblower’s disclosure, the system runs on a “zero percent failure rate”: one mismatched scan rejects the entire batch, even if it holds tens of thousands of ballots.

This is just PRI-level bullshit, to operationalize the real voter fraud, which is what the Trump administration is going to be engaging in on a massive scale. (As always, IAIAC!).

My large-scale organizational skills are non-existent, but let’s all do what we can to get the word out: DON’T trust the USPS with your vote. If you can’t or don’t want to vote in-person, which at this point huge numbers of people have every legitimate reason not to want to do any more, drop your ballot off personally, rather than turning it over to the Trump administration, which is what mailing it via the US Mail is.

. . . commenters are pointing out that some of the ungovernable tribal regions DON’T have drop boxes, and that part of the fuckery here is to keep people from getting ballots at all, so they can’t return them. Unfortunately a lot of the GOTV effort is apparently going to have to focus on physically getting people to polling places, to vote in person, hopefully early if not often.