alt Hacker NewsWhistleblower warns Postal Service mail ballot system has catastrophic problems
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> 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.
Regardless 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).
> 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.
What 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.
Given 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?
I'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?
voting by mail is pretty popular these days
https://electionlab.mit.edu/research/voting-mail-and-absente...
more controversy:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/25/us/mail-in-voting-states....
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/31/us/politics/postal-servic...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/02/us/politics/postal-servic...
Voting 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 owner of the voting system, is not going to order an audit of the owner of the voting system which made them president in the first place as that would paradoxically cast doubt on the president's legitimacy in the first place. The incentives are firmly against this.
So the one who is entrusted to tally the vote can unilaterally decide who is going to be the president for any election.
The only way they might get audited is if a president loses an election and then wins the next one; then they might demand an audit out of revenge... but that doesn't even guarantee an audit; such president would have enormous leverage to demand that the next election be rigged again; but this time, in their favor. Certainly a better alternative to jail time for the owner of the tally system.
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.
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Since 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?
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Our elections are beyond broken and untrustworthy. The fix is easy, but nobody will go for it:
Nothing but in-person paper ballots, except for demonstrated necessity, and in those cases they must be hand-delivered by a relative or caretaker. Ballots can be optical scan, but we MUST audit 0.1% of all ballots (by random selection after the election) by hand. If ANY discrepancy exists, a full hand recount must be done.
Here's the skinny: voting should have a barrier to entry. Your freedoms are important - people died for them. If you can't be bothered to fight a little for them with something as basic as putting on a pair of pants to head the the polls in person, you don't deserve your freedom, and you certainly shouldn't be voting on my freedoms.