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The United States Postal Service (USPS) has been secretly and, at times, unlawfully working on an unprecedented new screening system that could result in millions of midterm election ballots being thrown out, according to an alarming new whistleblower complaint.

Under pressure to swiftly implement President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting mail-in voting, a USPS whistleblower says the agency is undertaking a “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed process” to make a system that could introduce a set of “potentially catastrophic” problems into this year’s elections and beyond.

The new procedure involves a slate of untested IT systems that would give USPS unprecedented discretion over whether or not it should mail ballots issued by state election officials. It does this through a system called the USPS Federal Ballot Mail Portal, nicknamed the Portal, which screens ballots before allowing them to be mailed.

The system is “entirely new and untested,” the whistleblower complaint says, meaning that there is a “high likelihood” of “major disruptions” to mail-in ballot procedures.

The Portal is currently designed to have a zero percent failure rate. This means that, if a single ballot in a batch from election officials isn’t properly scanned or verified against USPS’s system, then the entire batch of 10,000........

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