Blumenthal release on a USPS whistleblower disclosure about the ballot-mail portal

… <li>The teams building the new Portal and accompanying IT were “siloed” such that “when elements were brought together, the teams were unaware of various developments, creating more work.” There are also “no clear written requirements” leaving workers to “glean requirements from opaque comments at meetings.” As late as August 21, 2026, workers were still receiving new requirements for the project. Without clear guidance, “[d]ifferent team members continued to have different understandings of how the system is supposed to work.”</li> </ul> <ul type="disc"> <li>As teams scrambled ahead of the planned launch, the whistleblower is aware of multiple USPS officials describing the development process as “a shit show.”</li> </ul> <ul type="disc"> <li>USPS adopted a zero-percent failure threshold, meaning that “if a barcode scanner fails to correctly read one barcode in a batch, the entire batch is rejected and returned to the state.” Despite the potentially widespread and catastrophic implications of this policy, “USPS does not have a clear policy as to how many ballots will be sampled in ballot mail batches.”</li> </ul> <ul type="disc"> <li>The project was halted due to a court order and an injunction issued by the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts in late June 2026. Several weeks later, on or around July 29, 2026, however, “the project was suddenly resumed without explanation of what authority permitted USPS to ignore the court order.”</li> …