Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up
inquirer.com
inquirer.com
They had more legislative leverage prior to 2018, so they could have done all this much earlier.
It is not possible to honestly discuss this in a meaningful way without acknowledging it's 3 months out from a presidential election. It the closest thing they can legally do to suppress voting turnout, and it's a deliberate strategy to win the election by reducing the franchise.
This isn't in a vacuum either, it's a coordinated part of a national legislative strategy (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/04/exposin...). It is coordinated across at the state and federal levels, and across branches. You can see here with the intentional degrading of the USPS immediately prior to a national election, at a state level with polling place closures (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-locations/so...) and photo id laws (https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...), and constellation of Republican judicial appointments coordinated with specially prepared and crafted legal challenges by Republican AGs and private parties at state and circuit levels.
This is how it's being done: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/...
If anything, all entities promising retirement benefits should be forced to do it the way USPS does. In fact, non government entities were forced to via the Pension Protection Act of 2006, which is why non government employers stopped offering defined benefit pensions and other post employment benefits (OPEB) as they are simply not affordable.
Too bad it didn’t apply to governments, because if it did, then my kids and I wouldn’t be stuck paying for labor performed 30+ years ago because all the city and state governments decided they can just promise to pay people with future taxpayers’ money by underfunding defined benefit pension plans and retiree healthcare benefits.
You could steal the vote from 500k Republicans in just Alabama and 150k Democrats spread across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania and have a net swing of 0 EC votes lost and 50 EC votes gained for Republicans.
You just have to create policies (like closing polling place, making vote by mail difficult, create voter id rules that exclude college students) that have small partisan differentials in a few swing states, which is why the greatest effort and impact is in urban centers in the midwest (followed by Latinx populations in the southwest like AZ and NM, and African American populations in the southeast like FL and GA).
> The R Street Institute, a think tank dedicated to free markets and limited government, recently released a study titled “Why conservatives should embrace sensible measures to expand absentee balloting.”
> The study cast doubt on claims that Democrats benefit from expanded mail-in voting, pointing to three states Trump carried in 2016 — Utah, Arizona and Montana — where about 70 percent of voters cast ballots through the mail.
GOP leadership is just totally unhinged.
Unless there's a swing back to restoring democratic norms there's no reasons the coming years are going to be much different, no matter who is elected president.
If Biden is able to take office I expect work to be done to try to salvage things.
Absolutely nothing prevents that from happening again. The economic, social, and political forces that disadvantaged large swathes of the public, riling them up enough to make them take a chance on Trump, are all still there. If anything, the fact that the COVID-19 recession is likely going to hit full force during the next administration and make their situation even worse makes voting for demagogues even _more_ likely. Biden isn't going to be able to wave a magic wand to fix the world even if he wins, which is not a given.
We're in for a bumpy ride.
But that climate, the white collar criminality, the nation wide rampant electoral schemes, the inequality haven't changed. What gave birth to Trump winning the 2016 election is still there. If I understand correctly, there's no reason republicans would support a democrat president trying to salvage thing considering they didn't prevent the swift acceleration in deterioration during the last four years.
Maybe Trump was an unknown as far as the governance he would provide but it was known what kind of individual he was (and to an extent what would happen if elected, in broad lines).
I don't know, I am in the final chapter of Sarah Kendzior "Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America" and things do look grim indeed.
As a consequence, it'll take a lot more than one term to undo everything that Trump has done in one term, and the way things were before Trump wasn't really peachy either.
One Trump term is going to require at least a decade to undo, and that's if it remains at just one term. Now add climate change on top of that and the future looks pretty grim.
I cannot believe that no one foresaw an election in a pandemic and said, “let’s build an app for this”
since trump lost the popular vote in 2016, isnt your grand republican conspiracy both categorically false and totally meaningless if it werent?
Do you really believe that someone winning in the previous election is a guarantee that they would not try to suppress the vote in the current or future elections? If not, what point were you trying to make by bringing up the results of the 2016 election?
This is so absurdly dramatic. Just about everything is back open and ppl agree that wearing a mask basically removes all risk. If ppl want to vote, they can get off their ass and go vote.
And from a security standpoint, how can you say this with a straight face? Some of the hardest modern struggles in the tech industry revolve around security...and you're over here acting like mailing in paper ballots, with no authentication/encryption/verification is a secure practice. All it takes is one or a few bad actors to skew the results. Look up cognitive dissonance, I think it's hitting you hard here.
It's funny you open your reply about "absurdly dramatic" then lay an equally absurd claim about vote-by-mail having a problem with fraud.
Your reply also conveniently ignores the historical pattern of voter suppression coming from the Republican party.
It seems in America, some constitutional rights are more protected than others.
I'd worry a lot more about computerized election systems before voting by mail. I think people are too worried about individual votes/errors. 0.0x% of ballots being lost/not counted/etc. is a problem with any election system ("hanging chads", signatures not matching well, ...), not just voting by mail. The question should be how hard is it to pull off a large scale disruption/fraud without being detected.
Meanwhile, rigged voting machines that flip votes have been caught on camera countless times. Zero effort has been made to do anything about that.
Most elections aren't close enough for the outcome to be swung by the kind of paper ballot fraud that a single person is capable of committing. Unlike electronic hacks, paper ballot fraud doesn't scale.
Technically that shouldn't matter. It's a government service and if postage doesnt cover the cost the federal government should.
But I'd be happy to see first class mail stop subsidising other stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_posta...
The whole deferred compensation scheme known as defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare morphed into a way for politicians to push payroll expenses into the future so that they could get elected on "low tax" platforms. They can get away with this because the laws requiring saving for deferred compensation don't apply to government entities.
With a defined contribution plan, the employer is off the hook immediately after giving the employee the cash.
With defined benefit, the employer is on the hook for all adverse investment performance as well as broader economic turmoil decades into the future.
That would be nice but [insert financing excuse here] others cant do it too.
> Too bad it didn’t apply to governments, because if it did, then my kids and I wouldn’t be stuck paying for labor performed 30+ years ago because all the city and state governments decided they can just promise to pay people with future taxpayers’ money by underfunding defined benefit pension plans and retiree healthcare benefits.
Yes but forcing just USPS to do it was an attack on USPS because it has to compete with private companies. State and local run organizations have no such competition thus 'locally too big to fail'.
I've heard of some interesting talk about making a working USPS federal credit union/bank for a variety of services to the public that might prove lucrative and something that would potentially ease USPSs cash troubles. I'm not an expert into the economics about that and it might prove disruptive to a lot of businesses.
I don’t know what this means.
>Yes but forcing just USPS to do it was an attack on USPS because it has to compete with private companies.
FedEx and UPS are subject to the same pension and retirement benefit funding requirements as USPS. It’s only government entities that aren’t regulated (because politicians like to be able to pay current employees with future taxpayer money and advertise they are keeping taxes low now so they get elected).
Not letting USPS set it’s prices is what might make it non competitive with UPS/Fedex.
No they FedEx and UPS were required to prefund pensions in the 1970s, but they were given 40 years in which to do it.
USPS was given 10 years. In addition USPS was required to prefund retirement medical benefits, and unlike a private company who can cut retirement medical benefits at any time, USPS requires an act of congress to cut retirement medical benefits.
Furthermore, when calculating how much they need to set aside for retirement medical benefits, USPS can only use a much lower interest rate than private companies are allowed to use because they are forced to invest only in T-bills.
Also, I find it ridiculous that retirement medical benefits can just be cut anytime, as they are part of the compensation agreement. It's just a fluke of the law that it was never enshrined like defined benefit pensions were.
I don't see where the USPS is required to use T-bill rates to value liabilities in the tex of the PAEA law:
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/109/hr6407/text
>who shall hold membership in the American Academy of Actuaries and shall be qualified in the evaluation of pension obligations, to conduct a review in accordance with generally accepted actuarial practices and principles and to provide a report to the Commission containing the results of the review.
As to investing look at page 35-36. It’s not literally just T-bills, but treasury holdings with very low interest rates compared to the kinds of investments private companies are allowed to make.
https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/10k-reports/fy2...
That means expanding these requirements to other departments will need sigificant political backing and will be very unpopular. I do view benefit funding requirements as necessary.
> politicians like to be able to pay current employees with future taxpayer money and advertise they are keeping taxes low now so they get elected
looks like you agree with me on that.
> Not letting USPS set it’s prices is what might make it non competitive with UPS/Fedex.
That is an entirely different discussion that would garner my interest.
No, that really is the problem. Prefunding pension liabilities is something that literally no company or federal agency ever does, for obvious reasons.
https://www.cnbc.com/2011/10/24/the-truth-about-the-post-off...
> Although accounting rules require the postal service to calculate future liabilities, including those for projected future employees, the law only requires pre-funding of obligations to actual current and past employees
And no, no private entity in the US is required to prefund retiree health benefits.
What should they do that neither involves setting sufficient money aside today nor a significant chance of failing to fulfill their obligation?
Keep in mind that USPS' core business can't turn much of a profit due to Congressionally-defined price caps, so it is a very poor place to "invest" money.
The correct link appears to be:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/us/politics/postmaster-ge...
I haven't followed any of this story and this is the first time I'm reading up on it, but why would this increase the chances of Trump winning? Wouldn't restricting mail-in voting affect both sides roughly equally? That's what I would expect, anyway, but perhaps I'm missing something?
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/25/postal-compromise-close-as-u...
[2] https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/trump-postal-service-cha...
If they wanted to privatize it, they could have don’t it at any time during the past four years.
Yes it is.
> it’s about disrupting their ability to process mail in ballots for the election.
True, but those are complementary not mutually exclsuive motivations.
I don't play along with excuses. As I said, if it was really about that, they had numerous opportunities in the past four years.
I don't think either of those motivations is okay, in fact, I think the action being taken on either basis alone would be, and a fortiori them being taken with both motivations is, a serious abuse of executive power.
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazon-reaches-1-million-w...
[1]: Which the USPS is not, but let's be flexible with the term.
Because letters are paper but so are magazines, newspapers, etc that I know are delivered by non-USPS mail carriers.
It isn't a very persuasive argument to destroy cheap post for the masses to... let investors make money. As it is if usps was incapable of fulfilling its duty private entities could enter the market at way higher prices and if useful would see business.
First class mail is a "monopoly" as someone downthread noted, but not the kind that anyone trying to make a profit would want. The post office cannot set prices on first class mail (that's done by Congress) and needs to deliver mail everywhere at the price Congress has mandated, even when it is done at a loss.
I just learned this, but yes, that appears to be the case! The private express statutes[1] appear to do just that.
In 1971 a private corporation, the Independent Postal System of America, offered to deliver Christmas cards for five cents each — three cents less than the U.S.P.S. rate. They were stopped by a court injunction.
In 1966 the CF&I Steel Corporation, frustrated by the quality of postal service between their Denver headquarters and their plant in Pueblo, hired an armored-car service to deliver the mail. After five months of operation the service was halted by the Denver Post Office, and "at the Post Office’s suggestion" CF&I paid two thousand dollars toward back postage..
I do tend to think the USPS should be allowed to increase their rates to sustainable levels. Individuals are not nearly as dependent on being able to regularly send letters across the country for well under a dollar as they once were.
1. Destroy the viability of the post office as a business (a long running campaign)
2. Disenfranchise voters (a relatively recent campaign)
Tens of thousands of people were disenfranchised during the primaries because their ballots were received too late, even if they were postmarked on time. [1]
Tax returns are considered to be submitted on the date of their postmark, but ballots are not. There seems to be an important disconnect here tied to the different incentives for the state.
Dropping ballots off at dropbox makes a lot of sense, but it won't work for everyone. The rules also vary and availability is often poorly communicated. Plus, most people won't expect to have a problem with their ballot being counted until they find out that it wasn't counted.
But the problem doesn't start with submitting your ballot. First you have to successfully register to vote-by-mail (some states require a form to be mailed in), and most importantly you have to actually receive your ballot in time. This also happened during the primaries, and so people had to go vote in person after all (or be disenfranchised). [2]
Lots of things we take for granted will stop working with a failed postal service, but voting is particularly key right now. It is the only path towards attempting to fix the issue at hand.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/07/13/889751095/signed-sealed-undel...
[2] https://time.com/5874571/new-york-state-general-election/
All arguments and restrictions along those lines serve only the private businesses that would benefit from its de facto dissolution.
Per the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Reorganization_Act
> The United States Postal Service shall be operated as a basic and fundamental service provided to the people by the Government of the United States, authorized by the Constitution, created by Act of Congress, and supported by the people. The Postal Service shall have as its basic function the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities. The costs of establishing and maintaining the Postal Service shall not be apportioned to impair the overall value of such service to the people.
Recent as in it started the instant the 15th amendment was passed.
Jim Crow laws were much more effective means of disenfranchisement during Reconstruction.
This is just frustration, but the fact that we could pass a massive defense bill (again, I know), but are unable to fund basic services shows the integrity of our government. Moreover, it shows the culpability of most of the elected officials, from both parties.
We don’t need a labor movement, we need a people’s movement.
It shows that after the labor movement was destroyed, the only material base for the Democratic Party was to go looking for money from the same people who give it to Republicans.
Saying we don’t need a labor movement is equivalent to saying “we don’t need a political party that relies on support from workers.”
The subdivision and segregation of American political movements has been an incredibly useful tool in defusing them. The labor, civil rights, suffrage, identity movements, were powerful, but the lack of intersectionality made it so that once policy victories were achieved the tenor died down. My comment was focused on how this was a fundamental weakness.
For example, is voting by mail a "labor" issue? I would say no, and even if this opinion is generally wrong it shows the subdivision that occurs. There is no modern suffrage movement in the same way as existed in the early part of the 1900s. The idea of a "people's movement" is to say we need a political party that relies on the people, not kleptocrats, not lawyers, not donors, and fights for issues that are relevant to those people.
I didn't march in the recent protests because I am black, because I've felt fear from the police, because I've been systemically oppressed. Most of my peers didn't either, and the ones who were subject to those oppressions, among many others, are far braver than me, and for that I feel empathy. And for that we should march. These are issues of "people" because that's the most common denominator, not because we're excluding the factors.
The underlying thread of what I said is that we need a movement that relies on the common empathy we have for each other. I want community. I want justice. I want to love my neighbor, as myself. I want you to pray to your god while I mine, even if mine is just a nice bike ride on a Sunday morning.
And I know cynics, rightfully jaded by their lives, will probably say I'm being hopeful, youthful, naive. And I accept all of these, but I'd rather be those than have what we have today, what a simple cross to carry.
I guess I just want to listen to John Lenin's Imagine and feel like he's talking about my world. And I'm not the only one.
While it’s good to acknowledge the failings of prior forms of the labor movement in addressing issues of race and gender, this doesn’t reflect their current state or reality. Unions for groups like the teachers, nurses, or service workers across the country are already wildly diverse across every axis.
The primary failing of solidarity in the US is among white collar professionals, who see the struggle of these workers as separate from their own concerns, even though these unions been fighting for the racial and economic justice for many years prior to the current unrest. To my mind, this is the result of an ingrained classism, where said white collar workers see themselves above unionization (and thus the working class union members), preferring acts of temporary, performative symbolism over durable structures that would unite them with others across class lines. The first step in fighting this would of course be to form their own unions in explicit solidarity with those of the working class.
Now, the unions were a good way of funneling support to the Democrats. (Which, by the way, was a bit unfair if you were a Republican and a union member, but that's not the point.) What's missing now for the Democrats isn't the workers, it's the mechanism for mobilizing bulk support.
The people's movement is happening right now.
> it shows the culpability of most of the elected officials, from both parties.
The "both parties" remark drives me crazy, as if they are equally culpable in how we got to today, or equally culpable in their current leadership of America, so let's just back up for a moment.
No Democratic president has won a majority of the white vote since 1964. The Republican Southern Strategy cynically used racism to dismantle the New Deal. Mondale was the last New Deal democrat. His crushing defeat by Reagan is what led to the the current Democratic party. See the Democratic Leadership Council. The Democrats had lost the white vote to racists and they had to do something to start winning elections. So they adopted the so-called Third Way.
Simultaneously, Republicans and "right-to-work" (hah) laws dismantled unions, the primary source of Democratic fund raising. The Democrats had to go somewhere for money and that somewhere was corporate donors.
So we end up with both parties beholden to corporate influence and neither party truly representing working class voters. But let us not forget that the Democrats didn't have a whole lot of options. Republicans also loosened campaign finance restrictions making it even more expensive to win elections. Heads we win, tails you lose.
So the Republicans hold on to white working class voters through racism, not because they represent their economic interests. The Democrats become the "everyone else" party but are too much in the pocket of corporations and wall street. (One of Obama's biggest mistakes was not locking up the crooks responsible for the sub-prime crisis.)
Still, the Democrats are much more the party of the working class voter than Republicans. You don't see any Republican candidate arguing for sectoral collective bargaining for example. Republicans, not Democrats, are trying to kill the USPS, the largest provider of decent working-class jobs in the country.
I hope that Trump is the end of the Southern Strategy and that we end up with a not-racist Republican party. The Democrats need an opposition party that's based on serious policy differences instead of a party based on racism and cynicism.
For example, I don't think there's a free-market answer solution to health insurance, but if the Republicans believe that, let them at least make a serious proposal.
Here's an example of where the Republican party might go:
Five years ago, Oren Cass sat at the center of the Republican Party. Cass is a former management consultant who served as the domestic policy director for the Mitt Romney campaign and then as a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. But then he launched an insurgency.
Today, Cass is the founder and executive director of American Compass, a new think tank created to challenge the right-wing economic orthodoxy. Cass thinks conservatism has lost its way, becoming obsessed with low tax rates and a quasi-religious veneration of markets. What conservatives need, he thinks, are clear social goals that can structure a radically new economic agenda: a vision that puts families first, eschews economic growth as the be-all-end-all of policymaking, and recognizes the inescapability of government intervention in the economy. Trump is likely — though not certain — to lose in 2020. And then, Cass thinks, Republicans will face a choice: to return to a “pre-Trump” consensus, or to build a “post-Trump future” — one that, he hopes, will prevent more Trump-like politicians from rising.
In this conversation, Cass and I discuss how current economic indicators fail, the relationship between economics and culture, why Cass believes production — not consumption — should be the central focus of public policy, the problems with how our society assigns status to different professions, the role that power plays in determining market outcomes, the conservative case against market fundamentalism, why Cass supports labor unions and industrial policy but not a job guarantee or publicly funded childcare, what the future of the Republican Party after Donald Trump looks like, whether Cass’s policies are big enough to solve the problems he identifies, and more.
https://overcast.fm/+QLhWcHCkY
Now that's a serious policy difference we can discuss instead of the clown show that is the current Republican party.
I have a lot of beefs with the Democratic party but it's not "both parties" by any stretch of the imagination.
There's also a third option: double down on Trumpism / Tea Party politics and voter suppression/manipulation. Even with the current crisis and Trump being essentially a proto-fascist, he has a 41% approval rating. More than many Western conservative or outright alt-right/fascist parties enjoy.
If Trump will lose in November that won't be the end if it, it might be the start of of a healing process and it's encouraging to see people like Cass are actively working on this, but I fear Trump won't be the last of his kind getting elected to office.
I hope to hell I'm wrong. It's important to not be defeatist about this, but it's even more important to not declare victory after President Biden gets elected.
Furthermore, the issues with COVID seem overblown. I've waited in line to vote, but the lines were never longer than the lines at my local supermarket on Saturday morning. If we can shop for food in person, we can vote.
If you want to understand the fears over mail-in voting, just imagine what you could do if you control the mail sorting for a large apartment building or nursing home. It is just much harder to cheat when you require a physical body to be present at the polls. Not impossible but harder.
You've been very lucky then.
For Obama's first term election, the lines at my polling place were across the room, out the door, down the hallway, out the building door, and a good distance down the block (i.e., easily a few hundred or more waiting in line to get their chance to cast their vote). And it was like this starting from before the polls opened until they closed.
Many would have loved to see lines "never longer than the lines at my local supermarket on Saturday morning" for that election at that polling place.
As is disproportionately the case on HN, you are probably a relatively privileged individual, living in a relatively privileged community. Even if not, you should be aware that generalizing from your personal experience is not reliable.
Me and my peeps did the yeoman work to both protect the secret ballot and ensure end-to-end auditability.
If every jurisdiction nationwide adopted the rules, procedures, and operations used by King County Elections, we'd be in good shape.
But they won't.
A lot of people have some very funny ideas about how to conduct elections.
For examples:
Should ballots be required to be received or postmarked by Election Day to be accepted? (Correct answer is postmarked.)
If a voter makes a mistake, how does it get corrected? Some jurisdictions just toss any ballot with any mistake.
What are the standards for signature verification? What happens if the admins identify a mismatch?
Sadly, the minutia goes on and on.
In principle, you should advocate for the Australian Ballot, which is private voting and public counting.
The election integrity gold standard is casting ballots at poll sites which are tabulated onsite the moment the polls close and the results shared immediately.
Some of the larger identified risks of postal balloting, generally, are mass disenfranchisement, losing the secret ballot, ballots and votes lost to the process, making auditing much harder, and pre-tabulating votes (as ballots are received).
Specific precautions and safe guards are required to mitigate these risks. Even well intentioned election administrators often don't have the resources, skills, and experience to conduct large postal balloting (aka vote-by-mail).
Despite all the known risks, the benefit of enfranchising people who'd other wise not be able to vote is reason enough to support vote-by-mail.
In conclusion, at this time, the correct policy position at this time is to dramatically increase funding for election administration and deploy 1,000s of election observers.
If you truly consider problems with the VRDBs a high priority, then advocate for nationwide automatic universal voter registration, like every other mature democracy has done, thereby eliminating the problem.
Further, I really do think you should compile an exhaustive list of all the problems and attack vectors you've found. Start by comparing and contrasting the procedures from misc jurisdictions. Observe some elections. Attend all the canvassing board meetings for an entire election cycle. Interview election administrators. Etc.
What you learn may surprise you.
Ballot stuffing just isn't possible with the procedures used in King County and thru out Washington State.
With poll sites, everyone had to sign in a poll book to receive a ballot.
With postal ballots, they use ballot tracking and reconciliation reports.
So. There are many valid election integrity criticisms. You haven't mentioned any of them yet.
That’s what mail in voting compares to.
It was obvious to anyone with a single honest neuron that there was no way to trust these machines.
I've never voted since. There is no point in pretending like the system has credibility or accountability.
[1] https://columbusfreepress.com/article/diebold-indicted-its-s...
[2] https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/05/27/touchscreen-voting-makes-e...
Edit: Toned it down a bit. How many downvoting cowards do we have out there? Respond or GTFO.
Also, if the comment above is your "toned down" wording, I'm glad I didn't read the original version, or I probably would have downvoted you.
To many of us, the system has lost all cedibility, and voting is signalling just the opposite of that. Nothing about embarrassing anyone. No way to regain people trust at this point. We're too far gone.
Are you hoping that your non-participation in voting is "signalling" the lack of credibility in the system, and that public awareness of this will contribute to some eventual improved outcome for society, or are you just trying to avoid misleading(?) people into believing the supposed false notion that voting can lead to positive changes in government policy?
The system is broken and one of the indications of this is all the people that belive that voting can actually make a change for the better, as opposed to just swapping out puppets with no change of puppet-masters.
I suppose it's possible that all the policy changes we've seen in governments around the world over the past decades have been due to changing whims of secretive puppet-masters which happen to coincide with the platforms of the candidates who ended up winning the elections, but I don't think that's the simplest explanation for the patterns observed.
But ... have you noticed who is in office? The stakes are too high to make these sort of principled stands right now. Hell, I'm not even talking about the politics of it: four more years of Trump will mean four more years of a deeply toxic person in office bringing the entire level of discourse of the entire country down. Literally everyone of every political affiliation will be hurt by this, except perhaps die-hard anarchists who would prefer to see the entire society collapse (and Trump is certainly a step in that direction).
For one thing, we give people exactly one day for in-person voting, and they don't get the day off from work - so they probably have a total of maybe 5 non-work hours available to them during which polling places are open, they go to one, stand in line with thousands of other people, then walk into a crowded place, interact up close with polling staff, and then interact up close with polling equipment. The polling equipment is not frequently sterilized (if at all), the polling staff might not have protective gear, and the polling places are cramped and poorly ventilated. It doesn't matter how many people need to vote there - 100k? 1k? same difference - you've all got to do it today, and in these specific hours.
Sounds really safe!
In comparison, you can go to the grocery store whenever is best for you (as long as they're open - and many are open 24 hours any day of the week), there are lots of locations to choose from, and if you go during off-peak hours the aisles are relatively empty and you have enough space to social distance from the other people in the store. At this point, the staff typically have masks+gloves and there's often hand sanitizer and cough shields. Some grocery stores explicitly limit the # of people inside at any given time.
In my town, they've moved to paper ballots for audibility. This is also great for mitigating disease transmission because each person only touches their own paper ballot.
There's no reason why each polling place can be brought to the same level of danger as a local grocery. It won't be hard.
easier voting -> more votes -> undesirable outcomes
Now is a time to be absolutely frank and direct with our words and our actions. Our democracy is not invincible. It is not inevitable. It is teetering on the brink and if it falls, there is absolutely no guarantee that it will recover.
There is exactly one party who is trying to undermine the most basic principle of our democracy, and that is the Republican Party.
Every fallen democracy had an election that was unexpectedly their last.
Vote, donate, discuss accordingly.
NYTimes disagrees with you that higher turnout always helps the Democrats.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/upshot/2020-election-turn...
Typically increased turnout helps the Democrats, but that’s not necessarily true now.
You’re right that the Republicans may very well be hurting themselves by disrupting Americans’ right to vote. They might be hurting themselves. They are definitely hurting our democracy.
Well maybe Trump doesn't read the NYTimes:
"Trump says Republicans would ‘never’ be elected again if it was easier to vote"
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/30/trump-republ...
The Republicans are the wrong answer, but by and large and consistently for the last 80+ years the Democrats have not been the right answer. The US has a void (many voids, but this one in particular is most problematic) of a labor / workers party. Democrats are liberals and republicans are conservatives, both of which represent capital interests. This lack of representation is structurally foundational to US government and has been intentional since the founding over 2 centuries ago, and its also intentional that the only path to correcting it without violent revolution is a supermajority of states to compel an amendment to fix it. Which is in and of itself a nondemocratic process because a supermajority of states have a minority of the population.
Here you have the Republican establishment, not insurgents, actively trying to disrupt Americans’ right to vote for their leadership.
In a republic, representatives are meant to be selected as being a stand in for the majority of their electorates will and interests. In aggregate, such authentic representatives would then be proposing policy and instituting an agenda corresponding to the desires of a majority of the public at large.
Studies show a supermajority support in the US now for drug war deescalation, universal health care, military disarmament and an end to the Middle Eastern occupations, more equitable tax code, and more. Policies a substantial minority in congress are even remotely interested in considering let alone passing.
Its not much of a democracy if the people you elect, in aggregate, are not actually acting in the interests of their electorate. At all. Its a democracy in name, but a plutocracy in practice, and to be fair this was the structural intent of the founding documents. Having a senate is undemocratic. Having an electoral college is undemocratic. First past the post voting is undemocratic. Historically, huge restrictions on suffrage, the barriers put in place for newly suffraged peoples to actually vote, general disenfranchisement / difficulties in voting, the lack of regulation on campaigning, etc are in place to perpetuate and empower the plutocratic power duopoly regime incumbent political institutions exist to protect.
But thats where conservative mindsets come from in the first place. Content with the status quo and in fear of things going wrong that they don't want to try to do right. And its not an unfounded fear - centuries of evidence shows regime change never works, especially when its against the interests of a societies incumbent ruling class. But I just don't like maintaining the veneer delusion that America is anything close to truly democratic, or has ever really been.
How many of those issues could the Democrats have fixed without passing a constitutional amendment? Such a change requires more than a Democratic administration with a legislative majority.
> elections being on a non-holiday Tuesday
Simple majority legislation
> absentee ballots being limited / restricted and operating state-by-state
Really easy to correct with conditional budget funding on the basis of providing / enabling absentee / mail in voting, again a simple legislative majority on a budget bill
> the persistence of first past the post voting being the least representative form of election
First past the post isn't codified into the constitution. The only part that requires constitutional amendment is the electoral college but that can already be overriden with a combination of popular vote interstate compact and said statewide elections being held in an approval or score voting way.
This one requires policy change that is federal law currently mandating first past the post, but its not constitutional. Additionally this could be done in a way that removes federal simple majority requirements in federal elections and instead uses federal funding incentives to pressure states to adopt more democratic election systems because that would face a lot less blowback from anti-democracy interests.
> the continued existence of the electoral college and senate
This is the one that absolutely requires amendment. The electoral college can largely be made obsolete with the interstate compact but little can be done about how undemocratic the senate is. That is wholly intentional though - the senate was introduced to give less populated states more influence in government and to largely provide capital a numerically small wing of congress to control more easily monetarily.
> nothing to correct the loss of voting rights for felons
Felony voting rights are currently state by state, and again federal law or financial incentives could be used to pressure states to not deprive felons of their voting rights, or it could be codified as law with simple majority.
So of my stated points 4/5 can be done with just regular law, much of it done with just budgetary law requirements.
Edit: article in case anyone isn’t convinced (I was skeptical at first, given the tone of the discussion): https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/us/politics/vote-by-mail....
Widespread vote from mail defeats that as it means that their selective polling closures, and arbitrary barriers to voting in person, go away
Closing polling stations in minority communities.
As it stands now, there are large groups of Americans for whom getting a photo ID is a non-trivial task. People without birth records, people who can’t take time off work to go to the DMV, people who don’t know that they go to the DMV to get an ID, people who live hours from the nearest DMV, so on and so forth.
Let’s make sure they all get a chance to vote. Any proposal that aims to do that, I believe, would not have the support of the Republican Party, because the Republican Party is uninterested in increasing voter turnout.
cant this be done, arguably even easier with mail-in voting?
You say that no one would have an issue with such a proposal but then list the argument I have heard from multiple people of why this won't work.
How is someone supposed to get an id without going to the DMV or some other government office? The government doesn't have a picture of everyone so people would be required to go into an office to get one. Some people are unable to go in due to the reasons you list.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_Identification_laws#Exam...
I agree this isn't the overriding concern of those trying to destroy the USPS, but it's surely a nice bonus.
His letters got turned over to the FBI, since they would up in different states. Turns out that each stamp has microprinting on it that identifies it. Given the stamp, they were able to identify which post office it was sold at. They guessed at approximately when it was sold, and then from the security cameras they identified the letter writer.
So... explain how private entities are going to do more surveillance?
But yes, the postal service has already been turned to this purpose in many ways and the days of "gentlemen don't read each other's mail" are largely over.
The only thing stopping them is a complete wreck known as Russian Post.
This is likely the sensible thing to do within a few weeks of the election anyway.
Even without the problems at the post office, dropping it off directly really reduces the chances of it getting lost.
Is depriving people of medicines and mail and making them wait weeks so they receive urgent communications and packages the right solution right now?
Wouldn’t it make far more sense to put in the short term Money during an emergency and try and figure out the long term solution afterwards?
Unless, of course, your goal Is a Hail Mary to cause chaos and confusion so you might win an otherwise increasingly unwinnable Election.
Clean water, fighting fires, drivable roads, edible food, reliable electricity, safety net for the poor elderly and infirm...
And delivering the mail.
And running the elections.
How did we get to this point in history where any of this is up for discussion?
There definitely is overtime going on, I’m not sure where the article gets that confused. You can have all the hours you want if you work for the post office right now.
We went party invitations to my mom brother who lives downstate four weeks ago. We just got it back the other day, he never received it. My mother still pays her bills with a check and she got an overdue notice from the power company. When she called a few days later they finally got the payment and applied it to her bill.
https://federalnewsnetwork.com/management/2020/07/usps-warns...
:-/
Also, you can make the same argument w.r.t to Facebook, google, ad networks, etc. you just pay for the ability to send email from gmail for free ️
https://www.shipstation.com/blog/usps-first-class-mail-vs-pr...
Also, the USPS has had potentially businesss-killing policies legislated into their finances by a hostile Congress, like requring pensions to be pre-funded seventy-five years in advance over a ten-year period.
That's not to say the Post Office is as efficient as it could be. But the services it offers (e.g., bank substitute in impoverished neighborhoods for check cashing/money orders, not to mention significant employer) are vital to American small businesses and communities.
I don't really know if any of this was a good move or not – I'm too young to remember the pre-privatisation era – but overall it seems to work reasonably well; certainly not as dysfunctional as the USPS seems to be. Either way, my point is that privatisation doesn't need to lead to the USPS refusing to serve difficult markets.
It's hard to imagine such intentionally bad management without some sort of motivation.
With respect, I don’t think that means what you think it means. We should work to remove ambiguity and threats to voting, not adding, and entrusting your ballot which is your most sacred right as an American citizen, to the Postal Service considering it’s history over the past 30 years, is far too dangerous for my taste.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/parsimon...
I encounter it almost exclusively in the context of statistical and machine learning.
Voting by mail has proven exceptionally safe with extensive modern use, and greatly increases the safety of elections and democratic participation. All claims to the contrary are based in partisan politics and have no data to back them up. You are sorely wrong and pushing a purely political agenda.
Privatizing government services is a money grab nearly 100% of the time.
1) They do not collect mail at houses or even street postboxes - you have to find a letterbox to drop your stamped letters, and those are less frequent than bus stops. My nearest two are about 400-500 meters away from my house in a neighborhood dense enough for an U-Bahn stop (and neither is at said U-Bahn stop). A good prompt for a walk for my able-bodied, middle-aged household, but hellaceously inconvenient for our 80+ year old neighbors.
2) A regular national letter is 0.80 EUR (US$0.94) in a country that does not have houses or small neighborhoods that are miles from anything else.
3) There are a few full service post offices that are also Postbank offices, but most parcel acceptance happens at shops that have DHL as a sideline. My city of 130,000 has two full service post offices, and one of them is only open 9:00-12:00 and 14:00-17:00 (and of course that's the one I have to pick up parcels that won't fit into the automated lockers at...)
Overall, privatized Deutsche Post is quite reliable, but its stability comes with trade-offs that the USPS is not allowed to make.
The public sector pension scandal is insane.
https://www.cnbc.com/2011/10/24/the-truth-about-the-post-off...
> Although accounting rules require the postal service to calculate future liabilities, including those for projected future employees, the law only requires pre-funding of obligations to actual current and past employees.
Asking individual agencies to save money for pensions just distorts monetary and fiscal policy.
When will people understand fractional reserve banking...
And it still results in devaluation of the dollar. You don’t get to pull resources from the future for free, especially if the expected economic growth doesn’t materialize.
We're talking about federal agencies.
> And it still results in devaluation of the dollar.
We could probably use more inflation, to be honest.
I would think that if such services were thought to be of federal powers, that many more bedrock services that are essential provide to all of society, such as internet service, would also be written in today if the founders had started in 2000.
RIP Lysander Spooner
They're prohibited by law from competing in regular mail delivery.
Add in the extra shenanigans that is the state of air cargo and different routes opening/closing and it's a very strange time to be trying to manage worldwide shipments.
A lot of the reasons the post office is in the red are purely political (e.g. limiting what services they can offer, price caps, and financial mandates).
I already purchased two years worth of stamps to support it. I also spent all my coins because the US Treasury has a shortage. We can all do more, particularly the bare minimal.
Forever stamps roughly match inflation, so you're not even losing money in real terms, so it's not a horrible return.
I don't use a lot of stamps myself, but I know someone who sells stuff on Amazon, eBay, etc., so if I bought $100 of stamps now, I could probably get them to buy them at full face value from me later. (It also looks like you can sell unused stamps online but only at around 70% of face value.)
Interesting how that's possible. Corona delayed things in Netherlands, but seems they dealt with it smartly. Those delays didn't last that long as well.
It does align with the suggestion that voting by mail is problematic, though seems like a created problem.
I’ve had a package in SF for 4 days now and it still hasn’t been delivered.
https://www.berkeleyside.com/2020/07/31/covid-19-us-post-off...
Agree that is unfortunately significant
It shouldn’t be political to point out that for Americans, and probably many other people in the world, the current administration has delivered remarkably poor outcomes so consistently that you have to consider the possibility that that is the goal.
America relies on strong infrastructure for our strong economy, and degrading an institution like the post office is just irresponsible.
The whole voting by mail aspect is another angle to look at the continued ongoing attacks on the American lifestyle; apparently empty supermarket shelves weren’t enough.
On top of all this absurdity, while it is clear that the degradation of service at the post office is intended to suppress democratic voters, there is little evidence that vote by mail privileges republicans: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/us/politics/vote-by-mail....
Do you really believe all that is worse than the Iraq and Afghanistan wars which caused millions of people to be killed? It sounds like you're just a nationalist who thinks their lives don't matter because they're not Americans. If millions of Americans were killed in a decade-long internal war, you would probably rank it worse than the mail being slow, fear for your American lifestyle, and the president's policies being stopped by the courts.
If Trump actually delivered and extricated the US from the Middle East you might have a point, but he hasn’t. At best he’s ceded control of important areas to anti democratic regimes (Russia, Turkey) while abandoning US allies: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/13/world/middleeast/syria-tu...
edit: If you care about civilian deaths, you might be particularly interested in recent policy changes made by the Trump administration: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-06/trump-can...
Another article describes the state of US murder of civilians in the Middle East: https://theintercept.com/2019/10/02/trump-impeachment-civili... - I totally forgot that Trump had promised to murder the families of suspected terrorists; perhaps is delivering on that.
(meta: parent comment is _exactly_ the type of bad faith, 'both sides' argument that I was referring to above; such arguments don't hold up under inspection or review of facts, but sadly people don't always take the time to point that out)
If I come up with numbers of deaths of innocents during these time frames, and Trump's are lower, will you agree that those extra deaths are not as bad as the mail being slow and the other stuff you complained about?
I just want to read Green Lantern Corps. :(
Regularly, employees would catch up on mail processing this way. Mail has been piling up ever since.
From what my pal told us, didn’t make sense given how mail is handled but it is also not unusual for unexplained top down orders in USPS to be given.
Questioning USPS management does not make you a valued team member—-most people are focused on making sure their vacation time gets granted or trying to get successful bids for new routes or workflows.
From many stories about the workings of USPS, it sounds to me like there are widespread inefficiencies in the post office.
(And as an aside, there are definitely USPS employees that would not have jobs without the powerful union that keeps them there. Stuff that never would be forgiven in private enterprise happens all of the time.)
However, this sudden action from the PM general is not the way to bring about change, it is just causing an organization with a lot of operational debt to redline.
In all seriousness, I live with a type 1 diabetic and I'm really, really glad that her insulin isn't delivered by mail anymore. This particular instance of fuckery could have literally killed my best friend.
It's mind boggling to me that this is being treated so brazenly as a political football. I'm sure there are inefficiencies and bottlenecks that could be addressed, but literally stopping the mail to illustrate some notion about how the market could somehow create a better solution is reckless and frankly pretty disgusting.
If this turns out to be somehow punitive because a certain somebody doesn't like mail-in voting, I'll be incredibly unsurprised.
Incredible that within 60-80 years the Republican party went from shoring up democracy here and abroad to naked fascism and intent on tearing up our institutions.