31B. Player rankings. Players on a team are ranked according to rating; the higher-rated players play on lower board numbers. Alternates must be lower-rated than regular team members. Unrated players, unless assigned ratings (28D), must play on higher-numbered boards than rated players.
Yet some team tournament forms, like the USCL, allow players a small margin (50 points in the USCL), in which a slightly lower rated player could play about a slightly higher one. I know the USCL is not USCF rated, but would allowing a a similar provision in a USCF team tournament be permitted, or would it violate 31B?
Organizers are free to run tournaments with variations to the US Chess Official Rules of Chess; see rule 1B.
It is perfectly acceptable for an organizer to allow switching board order within minor differences of rating. Of course, this is a major variation (rule 1B2) and needs to be advertised in all pre-tournament publicity.
The Massachusetts state affiliate has done something like this with some of its scholastic team tournaments. I forget what the exact cutoff is, but very low rated players (say, between 100 and 125) are allowed to play in any order. This is actually sensible; the predictive value of the difference between a 103 rating and a 106 rating (for example) is all but nonexistent, and the coach/team captain may have a good reason to think the player rated 103 would be better on board 3 than the player rated 106.
I vaguely remember that in one Olympiad the players opted to play in USCF-rating order instead of FIDE-rating order. In any case, if a fixed-board team tournament is both FIDE-rated and USChess-rated then it is quite feasible that the two rating orders will be different and thus could not be in both systems’ rating orders. Stating that FIDE ratings will be used would mean that the players may not be in USChess order. The same logic applies to a USChess dual-rated event regarding regular and quick ratings.
I also vaguely remember that some USATs have, on occasion, been advertised as allowing limited order switching.