NERMEEN SHAIKH: With the midterm elections two months away, a federal whistleblower has warned that the U.S. Postal Service’s new mail voting system is untested, fatally flawed and likely to lead to a “catastrophic failure” if it’s implemented ahead of November’s midterm elections. Critics warn the system could disenfranchise millions of voters.

In March, President Trump signed an executive order directing his administration to create federal lists of citizens and directing the Postal Service to refuse delivery of mail-in ballots to people not on those lists. Voting rights groups and state officials have sued to block the new rules. The anonymous whistleblower shared their complaint with Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal.

AMY GOODMAN: In the complaint, the whistleblower wrote, quote, ”USPS leadership, it appears, has discarded all best practices as they speed the project to be ready for a September 1 implementation — raising questions about whether catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug.” While the whistleblower hasn’t spoken publicly, Senator Blumenthal appeared on MS NOW on Tuesday night to talk about the whistleblower’s warning.

SEN. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: What he reveals is not only that the White House is breaking the law overtly, but for the first time using the Postal Service as an online gatekeeper with a system that screens those ballots and then, in effect, disqualifies individual ballots based on some discrepancy — the name, the barcode. Any tiny discrepancy, and the whole batch is thrown back to state officials. Now, the interesting thing and the outrageous part of it is that this online system is constructed in a way that it’s designed to fail. Failure is not a bug; it’s a feature.

CHRIS HAYES: Right.

SEN. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: So, it’s sabotaging the system, which is malignly designed in the first place.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut on MS NOW.

We’re joined by David Kligerman, senior vice president and special counsel at Whistleblower Aid. He’s representing the USPS whistleblower.

David, thanks so much for being with us.

DAVID KLIGERMAN: Pleasure to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: The first mail ballots begin to go out this Friday — that’s tomorrow — in North Carolina. The whistleblower that you represent revealed the Postal Service’s 0% failure rate rule. I’m wondering if you can explain how it’s possible that a single smudged barcode on one ballot could lead to the entire batch of tens of thousands of ballots from being counted. Explain what’s going on here and the message of your whistleblower.

DAVID KLIGERMAN: Sure. So, the message of our whistleblower is that they want the things that are being built to be built properly, and they want the systems that are being designed to be designed in a way that’s logical and fair and designed to work.

The concern, and with respect to this 0% failure, is that when you — the system has a number of hoops that need to be jumped through, right? Ordinarily in the past, it’s fairly simple, or very simple. The state wants to mail out blank ballots to voters. It creates them. It uploads a list into some manifest, like any great large shipping. It brings the printed manifest down to the post office. It hands it off, and they get sent. Right? And if the address of the person it’s to be delivered to is readable, it goes. There’s a barcode. If you can scan the barcode, great. If you can’t, you can enter it in manually — normal mail processes.

Well, this rule, to implement President Trump’s March executive order, now creates a number of hurdles, right? And there’s one — and the hurdles, in terms of the rule and the IT hurdles, merge here to really create this potential for grave, catastrophic failure. The rule itself, even if the IT worked, sets up a number of problematic hoops.

First, you have to — as the states, have to go and enter in data into this new database called the Federal Ballot Mail Portal. Right? So, they enter a list of all the voters who are supposed to get absentee ballots, and they do that enough time before the votes go out. And then, they have to — if they’re going to ship ballots, because it doesn’t just happen with a magic wand, right? These are millions and millions of physical blank ballots to go out, right? And they don’t go out in one huge super train, right? There are truckloads that go out to the post office, sometimes rural post office, sometimes large ones. And they go to these — the bulk mail facilities at these places, for the most part.

To bring them there, now under this system, you need to go in, and you need to create a manifest, a list, right? You go into a separate IT system that’s supposed to connect to this original IT system, and you enter the list of the ballots that are in this batch, right? And then you take those, and if it checks out, if the system is telling you — we’ll get to the why it’s going to be hard for it to tell you, but if it works properly and it lines up, and every ballot you have, the barcode matches the barcode in the initial system, then you get a green light, and you can bring that truck, that bus, whatever, of ballots down to the postal service area.

And then, you’re not done, because there’s a spot check. And so, you take a scanner, the Zebra scanner or something else that the postal workers or whoever at the facility has, and begin to test these ballots. Now, ordinarily, historically, when things have been scanned, it’s been to check postal rates, right? So, you do bulk mail, and let’s say there’s a thousand or 10,000 ballots. You do a sampling, and if, you know, a few of them are too big or off or weigh more, they might adjust your postage, but they’re not withholding those things from being delivered. Now you’ve got a process that you scan a certain sampling. The information that the whistleblower came forward with is that, for example, for a batch of a thousand to 10,000, you may sample 300 ballots. So, the problem also could be that for a thousand, you’re sampling 300, which is 33%. But be that as it may, you’re scanning, you’re checking. One error, one smudge, one inability to read the barcode, even if the software works — we’re going to get to that part in a moment — you’re going to reject the whole batch. And so, in Maricopa County, for example, there are examples of batches of a million ballots, and they could go back, and they have to start again, right? So, one could imagine that this process rates in a loop, an endless loop where the ballots don’t go out, or large tranches of them don’t go out.

Now you put on top of this a software system that’s been designed, the whistleblower complaint alleges — and we’ve seen experts who have opined that this kind of software development could take eight months, a year, sometimes two years to do. They’ve done it in a matter of weeks. They allotted eight weeks, essentially, to do this. And then they actually paused work for a few weeks. So they’ve been at it for maybe five weeks.

And there’s now a software system that at every phase has failed normal, basic procedures for development, right? So, you’ve got — you’ve got — you develop software in silos, in pieces. One team develops this part, this part, this part, this part. I mentioned a number of systems have to work together. Each of those has been rushed. They haven’t been tested properly individually. When they put them together, they haven’t been tested properly. And by the way, when they do test it, it crashes.

And now it’s in — the Postal Service has announced, consistent with what our whistleblower said was going to happen, that on September 1st, it’s available to be tested and used by the states. Now, technically, under the injunction, they’re allowing states to use it voluntarily and make use of it voluntarily. But the reality is, here’s a system that’s not going to work. And even if it did work from an IT perspective, it doesn’t work from a functional perspective. So, that seems to the whistleblower, and certainly to us, an anatomy of a failure.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, on Tuesday, ProPublica reported, quote, “Top U.S. Postal Service officials tasked with issuing new regulations on mail voting expressed concerns in internal meetings about how the rules they were drafting could delay or block ballots from reaching large swaths of eligible voters for the upcoming midterms, but the rules moved forward anyway.” This report was based on a source separate from your client. Could you elaborate on this, David?

DAVID KLIGERMAN: Sure. I mean, that goes to exactly what I mentioned, which is that — and it’s really good that others are coming forward, right? That what we’ve seen in that ProPublica piece is that it mentioned that election officials are raising these very same concerns that our individual, an insider, posed, in a position to see the broad swath of what’s happening here, has raised, right? Which is that you’ve really got the 0% failure, and it’s unacceptable to a process that has human error.

And by the way, it’s been pointed out in disclosure, there are a number of inspector general reports from the Postal Service over the years that talk about the error rates, worker error. And now there’s a report that came out, a tweet or a message from the head of the Postal Service union, a 200,000-strong union, that said, “Our people haven’t been trained in this. They don’t know what to do.” So, this is a really scary thing that’s going on right now.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, the whistleblower you’ve been working with is open to testifying in these open court cases. Can you talk about the significance of that?

DAVID KLIGERMAN: Yeah. You know, the individual right now has come forward, and I think, in this administration, when one comes forward, it’s at grave risk. And we’ve seen the weaponization of inspectors general. We’ve seen the weaponization of processes. But this person has come forward, and I think that they — nothing is ruled out, right? I mean, this is — there’s nothing more central to our government than democracy, and there’s nothing more central to democracy than free and fair elections. So, I think this individual has come forward, and while, you know, nobody wants to necessarily put themselves out there, I think if it came to the point where the testimony was the inflection point, was the thing that made the case turn, I can’t imagine the person would necessarily say no. So, I think everything’s potentially on the table, but the hope is that the processes will handle it just with the information that’s been provided. In fact, I’ve noted that already a number of states’ attorneys general have amended their filings in the various court cases to include our client’s disclosure as part of the evidence to hopefully permanently enjoin this policy.

AMY GOODMAN: So, finally, any key point you want to make, especially around the fact that currently there is an injunction by a judge that’s halted the implementation? Trump, of course, is appealing this. But what you think the Trump administration is trying to do in these last weeks? I mean, we’re talking about 60 days before the midterm elections.

DAVID KLIGERMAN: Yeah. I think what they’re trying to do, I would imagine, if I were in a situation of someone who has an allergy to voting rights, who has shown that they’re willing, able and desirous of blocking folks making use of the franchise, is it’s win-win no matter what I do, right? This is why Senator Blumenthal and our whistleblower have said you question whether it’s a bug or a feature, right? You sow doubt about the voting processes, so that’s a win. If people go into the portal and it doesn’t work, that’s a win. If you’re able to — if you’re able to have the processes sort of work, but not enough, but people think it’s going to be OK, that’s a win. But regardless, what you’ve got here is you’ve got a system that the administration is win-win, because they either scare folks or it blocks folks.

And I think one last point I’d like to make is no one is saying, and certainly the whistleblower is not saying, that we want folks not to exercise their rights to vote. I think they need to listen to their state secretary generals. I think there’s going to be information provided by their states into what to do. I think the hope is and the goal is that this will be fixed, hopefully by the courts permanently enjoining this, or, otherwise, by secretary of states stepping up and saying what to do. But we don’t want anybody not to exercise their rights and not to use mail-in ballot voting, if it’s done properly. We just want to inform the processes, and hopefully, hopefully, hopefully, it’ll be stopped either by judges or by cooler heads that prevail.

AMY GOODMAN: David Kligerman, we want to thank you for being with us, senior vice president, special counsel at Whistleblower Aid. David is an attorney currently representing the USPS whistleblower.