‘Years’ to Send Out Mail-in Ballots
Election experts are examining the new U.S. Postal Service rules for mailed ballots, and finding that under them, getting ballots in the mail could take weeks — or even years — rendering the program unworkable for an actual election.
“If it took one minute to verify each piece in the mailing, it would take about 4.9 years of continuous scanning to verify the whole mailing,” wrote Tammy Patrick, Chief Programs Officer of the National Association of Election Officials and a former elections official for Maricopa County, in a declaration as part of one of the legal challenges to the rule.
“If it only took only a second to scan each mailpiece, it would take 30 days,” she continued. “Even if it took only one tenth of a second to scan each mailpiece, it would take a little over 72 hours.”
Maricopa County, Patrick said, will send out 2.6 million ballots on the first day of early voting. Patrick wrote that under the new USPS rules, a single error could lead to the entire batch being rejected.
That squares with what a whistleblower from inside USPS alleged: a single error — which, the whistleblower underscored, could be human or technical — could lead to the entire batch of 10,000 ballots being sent back to election officials to be resubmitted.
Ann Jacobs, a former chair of the Wisconsin Election Commission, wrote on X that getting Milwaukee’s 33,567 primary election mailed ballots out could take more than two months. “At a minute each, that’s 559.45 hours or 69.94 work days,” she wrote. “At 30 seconds each, that’s 279.73 hours or 34.97 work days. A month of days of someone standing at a post office, watching a scanner. Heck, at 10 seconds each, it’s 93.25 hrs.”
“Not to put too fine a point on it, but ballots go out 9/17/26 in Wisconsin – we don’t have 35 work days,” she continued. “This is true across the nation.”
Indeed. In fact, North Carolina — a state with some 7 million registered voters and some important races in November — begins sending out absentee ballots today.
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court yesterday to immediately allow it to implement the USPS rule, despite a lower court injunction on it that is still working its way up to the Supreme Court.
Hat tip to NOTUS for flagging some of these former election officials’ comments.
Missouri Secretary of State’s Games Lead to Republican Gerrymander Being Blocked (at Least for Now)
The Missouri Supreme Court blocked an aggressive Republican gerrymander from being used in the November election.
- It’s a (late-breaking) loss for Republicans’ efforts to gerrymander Democrats out of political power after the Supreme Court knocked down a significant portion of the Voting Rights Act last spring.
- This President Donald Trump-backed map redrew a district in the Kansas City area, attempting to flip one of Missouri’s two Democratic congressional districts.
- The state Supreme Court held yesterday evening that some procedural hijinks meant November’s elections must be held under the old map, and that voters must be given a chance to vote on the new maps on the November ballot.
- The hijinks include a wild maneuver by Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins: Opponents of the new map submitted hundreds of thousands of petition signatures, more than enough to put the maps on the November ballot. Missouri law says that voters can hold a referendum on any act of the state legislature.
- But Hoskins waited until voting in the primary election — under the new maps — was underway to reject the petition, concluding that the state constitution did not empower voters to challenge redistricting.
- The state Supreme Court rejected that interpretation, and his broader gambit, finding redistricting was indeed an act of the state legislature.
- This all will likely end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Tabs
- Layla A. Jones has a fantastic piece for TPM probing how a baseless, right-wing freakout about an obscure data privacy technique used by the Census Bureau has culminated in claims that bureaucrats used the survey to steal congressional seats for Democrats. This fringe contention is now shaping Census Bureau policy.
- The Wall Street Journal paints a rough portrait of John Fetterman, concluding from an investigation that “the first-term senator shows little interest in doing the job beyond cultivating relationships with conservative media figures and advocating for Israel, according to interviews with more than a dozen former staffers and lawmakers, as well as text messages and other internal records.”
Woman of the Hour
It’s conspiracy theorizing television host Maria Bartiromo, ousted from her job at Fox Business for mysterious reasons. One report claims that she shared with the White House internal guidance about Fox’s decision to limit coverage of Trump’s July speech that attempted, again, to sow doubt in the 2020 election.
Are We at War?
JD Vance tackled the White House press briefing yesterday. “I wouldn’t call it a war. Right now, there is no active shooting,” the vice president said, before acknowledging “Iranians are shooting at commercial shipping.” The remarks, however, did not openly acknowledge the United States’ retaliation for what Vance described as “flare ups.”
