00:00One bad barcode. That's all it could take to bounce thousands of mail-in ballots back
00:05right before the midterms. And nearly one in three Americans vote by mail. Here's what's happening.
00:10In March, President Trump signed an executive order telling the Postal Service not to send
00:15mail-in ballots to anyone who isn't on a state voter list. The goal, they say, is to keep ineligible
00:20and non-citizen voters off the rolls. And USPS built a system to do that called the Federal
00:26Ballot Mail Portal. States upload their voter lists and clerks scan a sample of each batch
00:30against them. On Monday, Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, released an anonymous
00:35whistleblower's disclosure on how that system was built. Now, here's where we need to be a little
00:40careful. The whistleblower is anonymous and this is their account, not a proven finding. The claim is
00:45that the system has zero tolerance for error. One misread barcode and the whole batch bounces back
00:51to the state. And a batch can be tens of thousands of ballots. The whistleblower says there's no
00:55clear rule for how much gets checked and if your ballot gets caught up in it, there's no way to
01:00fight it. USPS and the White House pushed back, but not specifically on that. They said that the
01:05portal took months to build and these barcodes are routine. What neither answers is the actual claim,
01:10whether one bad scan can sink a whole batch. The states suing over the rule argue USPS shouldn't
01:16have any role in voting at all. As of right now, courts have blocked parts of the rule, but it's
01:21in effect
01:21some states start mailing ballots this week. Blumenthal wants answers by September 4th.
01:26So what do you think? Is this worth worrying about or not quite yet?
01:30Let us know in the comments and follow us here for more.
