The United State Postal Service says it is investigating a claim, made by a conservative nonprofit, that postal employees in Traverse City were told to backdate postmarks on absentee ballot envelopes arriving a day after the election .

That would be a violation of state election law.

“The U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General has learned of this matter and are looking into it,” USPS spokeswoman Agapi Doulaveris said in an email to Michigan Capitol Confidential. “We have no additional information at this time.”

The claim was made by Project Veritas.

The anonymous source claimed to  be a post office employee in a Nov. 4 interview with Project Veritas and stated ballots received on Nov. 4, the day after the 2020 election, had been time-stamped with a Nov. 3 date, making them eligible to be counted.

The anonymous source said employees were told to handstamp the envelopes. The individual making the claim did not appear on camera and spoke with a digitally altered voice.

Project Veritas released a second video on Nov. 5, claiming that a similar scheme occurred in a Pennsylvania post office.

When Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued a statewide stay-at-home executive order on March 23, Michigan was experiencing a daily rate of 91.9 new COVID-19 cases per million residents (using a rolling seven-day average).

On Nov. 2, Michigan was averaging 253.5 new cases per million, nearly three times the rate that triggered the original order.

Robert Gordon, director of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, was asked why he hasn’t issued an order to implement another stay-at-home order.

“We know so much more now than we did in March,” Gordon said, according to Bridge Magazine. “We know about the power of masks and that enables people to engage in a range of activities that weren’t possible then. So, I do think we are better positioned by the science and by the experience to live more fully in a way that we couldn’t in March.”

Gordon’s logic talks about “the power of masks” when combating the coronavirus.

But the mask mandate has been in effect since Oct. 5, just two days after the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that Whitmer’s pandemic-related executive orders were unlawful and unconstitutional.

In the weeks since Gordon imposed a mask mandate on Oct. 5, new cases of COVID-19 have increased from 106.4 per million to 267 per million, as of Nov. 1.