The plot to disrupt mail-in voting

Mail-in ballots sit waiting to be processed by workers at the county election office in Salt Lake City, Utah on October 29, 2020. | George Frey/AFP via Getty Images This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day.

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It took the US government two years to roll out HealthCare.gov, nine months to pilot a direct tax-filing tool…and just 11 weeks to build a new system for processing Americans’ absentee ballots.

Before you cheer this rare instance of bureaucratic efficiency, however, please allow the other shoe to drop: That figure comes from an alarming new whistleblower report that foretells potential chaos in this fall’s midterm elections.

According to the whistleblower, the US Postal Service has rushed out a janky, error-prone processing system in its mad dash to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order on mail-in ballots .

That order, currently paused, would require states to comply with new rules for preparing, tracking, and mailing ballots.

Several states have since sued to stop it.

If the order does go into effect, however, the Postal Service has to be prepared.

So the agency scrambled to hack together its new system — forgoing standard testing procedures and adding requirements that are likely to hold up thousands of outbound ballots, the whistleblower says.

According to the report, multiple USPS officials have described the system as “a shit show” that, as of late August, was apt to “completely crash.” “Move fast and break things” is actually not a great look for governments.

Go a little deeper View Link But the issue goes far beyond one IT meltdown at the post office, or even many IT meltdowns at many post offices.

As my colleague Ian Millhiser has covered in depth, Trump’s March executive order could effectively end mail-in voting in several states by imposing a slate of last-minute requirements that election officials don’t have time to implement.

Let’s just take the narrow issue of ballot envelopes.

Trump’s executive order directed the post office to issue new rules about the design of those envelopes, which the post office did…on August 21.