US Postal Service defends plan to require states to disclose mail voting lists

WASHINGTON, June 24 (Reuters) - The head of the U.S. Postal Service on Wednesday defended a plan demanded by President Donald Trump to require states ‌to provide lists of voters who received mailed ballots.

U.S. Postmaster General David Steiner ‌said at a U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing that, under the proposal, USPS would not deliver ballots in states where officials refuse to comply.

"The proposed rule basically coerces states to conform to these new requirements and hand over their absentee voter rolls, or face the consequences of not being able to vote by mail," said Senator Gary Peters, the top Democrat on ‌the committee. "That's unacceptable."

Steiner argued the ⁠plan would be more efficient and mirror what many states are currently doing. USPS is making sure "we match the ballots that a state believes ⁠they're sending out to what actually gets sent out."

The proposal would require states to provide the USPS the names and barcodes tied to their mail-in ballots for federal elections. It would also require states to provide unique barcodes applied to the outbound and return ballot mail envelopes, saying ‌it "will help determine adherence to federal law and facilitate law enforcement efforts."

All 47 Democratic senators wrote a letter to the Postal Service on Wednesday, urging the agency to drop the plan, calling it an "unconstitutional and illegal attempt to transform USPS into an election administration agency controlled by the White House and President Trump."

Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin said Steiner is a "pawn" in ‌Trump's obsession to take over elections. "You are being used (by President Trump)," Slotkin said. "He does not believe elections that he loses are valid elections."

For many years the USPS has scanned and imaged EVERY piece of mail that has gone through their system. From a technology viewpoint and especially now with AI it is a no-brainer to go back through previous elections and figure out exactly what fraud occurred.

For you nerds:

Mail Isolation Control and Tracking (MICT)

MICT photographs the outside of virtually every letter and flat mailpiece processed by the USPS. The system captures images of:

Recipient address
Return address
Postmark information
Envelope exterior

It does not photograph or read the contents of sealed mail. The information collected is essentially the “metadata” on the outside of the envelope.

Why Was It Created?

MICT was developed after the 2001 anthrax mail attacks, which killed five people, including two postal workers. The USPS wanted a way to trace mail pieces through the system and identify potentially hazardous mail.

How Long Has It Been In Use?

The program was created in the aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks and has been operating for more than two decades. Its existence became widely known in 2013 when the FBI and USPS publicly acknowledged it.

Was USPS Imaging Mail Before 2001?

Yes.

The imaging technology itself is much older. USPS automated sorting machines called Multiline Optical Character Readers (MLOCRs) have been capturing images of mailpieces for address recognition and sorting since the early 1990s. The associated Remote Bar Coding System (RBCS) has been in use since 1992.

In other words:

1992: USPS begins large-scale imaging of mail for automated sorting and address recognition.
2001: MICT is created following the anthrax attacks to facilitate tracing and tracking of mail.
2013: USPS publicly confirms that images of the exterior of essentially all processed mail are being captured.
An Interesting Side Note

The consumer service called Informed Delivery uses the same mail imaging infrastructure. When you receive an email showing images of today’s incoming mail, those images are generally being pulled from the mail-processing images already captured by USPS sorting equipment.

Given your background in large-scale data systems, you’d probably appreciate the scale of this operation: USPS processes well over 100 billion pieces of mail annually, and the imaging systems have effectively created one of the largest address-recognition and mail-tracking infrastructures ever built.

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