The alleged whistleblower, Richard Hopkins, said he overheard Postmaster Robert Weisenbach Jr. speaking to another employee Thursday about ballots that were supposed to be backdated. According to Hopkins, Weisenbach said most of the ballots that arrived on Wednesday, the day after the election, had been backdated to Tuesday, but one ballot had been mistakenly stamped with the accurate date, Nov. 4.

US law requires that mail-in ballots be postmarked by Election Day to be considered valid and counted. As of election night, President Donald Trump held substantial leads over Democrat rival Joe Biden in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia. But those leads were wiped out as election officials counted troves of mail-in ballots in the ensuing three days, putting Biden on track to win the election if the vote counts held up in court. Trump has vowed to launch wide-ranging legal proceedings, alleging irregularities within the vote counting process, claiming that if only “legal votes” were counted, he would’ve sailed to victory.

Hopkins is the “anonymous whistleblower” from Project Veritas' earlier video released on Thursday night. In the video, Hopkins alleged that the postmaster ordered late ballots to be backdated. Weisenbach denied the allegation, dismissing the claim as “untrue,” but hung up on Project Veritas founder James O'Keefe, providing no further comment as to the reported incident.

Hopkins said postal inspectors contacted him Friday and said that he had been implicated as the anonymous tipster. He said the inspectors wanted to get his side of the story to start an investigation, so he told them about what he'd seen and heard.

The Erie story followed other Project Veritas reports this week alleging mishandling of ballots in two other key states. Just as in the Pennsylvania case, a US Postal Service “whistleblower” in Michigan on Wednesday claimed that an employee was ordered to separate late ballots from regular mail so they could be stamped by hand with Tuesday's date. In Nevada, a postal worker appeared to have agreed to give a bundle of unused ballots that had been sent to incorrect addresses to an undercover reporter.

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