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The Post Office Is Deactivating Mail Sorting Machines Ahead of the Election

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21–30 of 67 posts

Re: The Post Office Is Deactivating Mail Sorting Machines Ahead of the Election

#21

I know this is an annoying thing to say, but: This is an argument for not having mail delivery being controlled by elected politicians.

Pander to people acting in bad faith because they act in bad faith...

Seems like a good strategy.

We need the postal service to be a gov entity because the alternative is having UPS control our elections.

Re: The Post Office Is Deactivating Mail Sorting Machines Ahead of the Election

#22
post #10

If only there was a communication medium which travelled at the speed of light and 100 years of research in information theory and cryptography which would allow secure auditable verifiable elections from the comfort of home. Nah lets use pre-telegraph technology.

Do not ever allow an election for who gets to control the nukes be decided by an e-vote. I don’t want Boaty McBoatface to be the president.

Re: The Post Office Is Deactivating Mail Sorting Machines Ahead of the Election

#23
post #8

My understanding is that in most areas without existing voter suppression efforts anything postmarked by election day should be counted. This will probably delay the announcement of the winner unless it is a landslide, which is not really that big of a deal unless you are a cable new channel that feels it is necessary to have 24/7 coverage of the election until the winner is announced.

It may still be helpful to delay the counting of these votes to further the narrative "look, Trump won by a large margin the first day, then all these mail in votes come in a week later and the winner is now Biden? Obvious mail fraud!"

Re: The Post Office Is Deactivating Mail Sorting Machines Ahead of the Election

#24
post #22
post #10

If only there was a communication medium which travelled at the speed of light and 100 years of research in information theory and cryptography which would allow secure auditable verifiable elections from the comfort of home. Nah lets use pre-telegraph technology.

Do not ever allow an election for who gets to control the nukes be decided by an e-vote. I don’t want Boaty McBoatface to be the president.

Arguably this is what happened with Trump - just indirectly.

But yes, internet voting is decades from ready.

Re: The Post Office Is Deactivating Mail Sorting Machines Ahead of the Election

#25

I know this is an annoying thing to say, but: This is an argument for not having mail delivery being controlled by elected politicians.

> This is an argument for not having mail delivery being controlled by elected politicians.

Which is not the same thing as having mail delivery being controlled by private companies, who are even less answerable to the public than elected politicians.

Re: The Post Office Is Deactivating Mail Sorting Machines Ahead of the Election

#26
post #2

How about we don’t have a mail in vote and just make the day a holiday.

We've actively lobbied for that for years--Republicans have refused, because they know that the people working low-income jobs whose managers will not let them off to go vote tend to lean Democratic. There are some states where the best we've managed is being allowed to take "unpaid" time off to go vote, with the caveat that your employer cannot fire you for doing so. Some states don't even have that much. Guess whic…

If you've actively lobbied for that for years, in multiple states and those darn Republicans refused it... Then those years would include times when there was a Democrat president and congress, and governors.

So maybe blaming the other side is just politically convenient?

Re: The Post Office Is Deactivating Mail Sorting Machines Ahead of the Election

#27

We do just in time shipping on top of the post office, so have visibility here. We're definitely seeing mail being delivered more slowly, with more delays. At the same time, it's a question of degree, not a major dismantling of the post office. I'd guess 90% of our packages are still arriving within a day of when they were supposed to. For context, I run bottomless.com, YCW19. We're shipping hundreds of packages from…

Hey, newish customer here. I’m in the 10%—my bag is somewhere halfway across the country, and USPS hasn’t posted an update in a week now. I’ll need to supplement with Instacart, which kinda breaks the abstraction.

I totally appreciate that USPS isn’t in your control.

Cost isn’t really a constraint for me, but running out of coffee is. I just checked and I don’t see a way to switch to FedEx or UPS for an additional charge. Is that something your team is exploring?

Re: The Post Office Is Deactivating Mail Sorting Machines Ahead of the Election

#28
post #8

My understanding is that in most areas without existing voter suppression efforts anything postmarked by election day should be counted. This will probably delay the announcement of the winner unless it is a landslide, which is not really that big of a deal unless you are a cable new channel that feels it is necessary to have 24/7 coverage of the election until the winner is announced.

That's determined by the states. In many states the postmark is irrelevant. The votes must be delivered on time or they don't count.

Re: The Post Office Is Deactivating Mail Sorting Machines Ahead of the Election

#29

We do just in time shipping on top of the post office, so have visibility here. We're definitely seeing mail being delivered more slowly, with more delays. At the same time, it's a question of degree, not a major dismantling of the post office. I'd guess 90% of our packages are still arriving within a day of when they were supposed to. For context, I run bottomless.com, YCW19. We're shipping hundreds of packages from…

You can do a great public service by publishing a metric of postal mail delivery timeliness from across the country.

Re: The Post Office Is Deactivating Mail Sorting Machines Ahead of the Election

#30
post #14
post #8

My understanding is that in most areas without existing voter suppression efforts anything postmarked by election day should be counted. This will probably delay the announcement of the winner unless it is a landslide, which is not really that big of a deal unless you are a cable new channel that feels it is necessary to have 24/7 coverage of the election until the winner is announced.

This is untrue - different states have different standards by which mail in ballots will be counted. A postmark on or before Election Day is no guarantee your vote will be tallied, depending on where you live.

it seems like that would be a reasonable goal, though- a SLO of 99.99% mail-in ballots with postmarks on or before Election Day should be counted.
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