The Post Office Is Deactivating Mail Sorting Machines Ahead of the Election | Hacker News Reader

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

vice.com

78 pointscryptoz64 comments

Posted this article separately but it was flagged. The quiet part has been said out loud by the president. The motivations have been made clear here and the speculation about why this is happening ends there IMO:

> “They need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo. “If they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/13/donald-trump...

My father in law works for the USPS and mentioned the elimination of these machines as well as elimination of overtime about a month ago.

It's being described as a result of a massive decrease in flat mail. From the local union newsletter:

"On 5-15-2020 USPS announced a National Equipment Reduction Plan to remove and scrap 671 pieces of equipment nationwide. ... USPS is scrapping and not relocating these machines because they don't see the mail coming back."

The 5/15 date is interesting because it's about a week after the new Postmaster/CEO was appointed. [0]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_DeJoy#U.S._Postmaster_Ge...

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 dozens of locations around the US every day.

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

Agreed. We are thinking about it. I really don’t want us to get involved in a partisan debate, but presenting the facts might inform the discussion overall.

That sounds like a great way to piss off someone high up in the post office/local delivery people at the post office.

I would be reluctant to post such a thing under my name - only aggregated and anonymized data.

Major bonus points if you include numbers from before the slowdowns.

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?

Sorry for the delays. We can't control it, but we still are responsible for your overall experience.

Generally we monitor this and send replacements if coffees get stuck. We will probably do this automatically soon. I understand this still isn't ideal.

We definitely are looking into allowing a FedEx option. We have a pretty complicated product, so it is nice to use a single shipper for now, though.

One thing that could help is picking coffee directly from a roaster that is close to you. If you tell me where you live, I can send you the best roasters for a consistent experience.

Thank you, that makes perfect sense. I hadn't considered optimizing for location. I just saw in the settings where I can choose a roaster, so I reduced the selection to those much nearer my location. And I did indeed receive an email about a replacement—very slick and very appreciated.

Thanks!

I don't want you to be without coffee either, but can't help but wonder if switching to UPS is exactly what Louis DeJoy wants you to do?

Point taken. I have been buffering supplies since February, and anywhere else I can support shipping delays with a bit of additional planning, but coffee and eggs are I think the two places in my lifestyle still coupled to just-in-time delivery. I have caffeine supplements stocked as a backup, but that misses out on the ritual.

It’s been an interesting year, kind of like playing Factorio but in real life.

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.

And in places like California which take a long time to count ballots they usually announce results and the election is effectvely over before everything is counted.

Most places will make the announcement once the outstanding ballots are extremely unlikely to change the result of the election.

So if Candidate A is winning 500,000 to 400,000 but 150,000 ballots are still outstanding then they'll make the call for Candidate A because there is no reason to think that the outstanding ballots will be that much different in distribution than the already counted ballots. This can be adjusted based on historical precedent as well, if you know that late counting precincts tend to vote in a certain way then you can make educated guesses as to when the results of that precinct will no longer make a difference. Even after adding in some extra margin for safety you can call the race.

The tricky part is when a race is really close and you have to count every ballot. This is when waiting 3-5 days for the mail to finish trickling in is going to cause cable news anchors to lose sleep.

Postal officials in Brooklyn testified that ballots had only a 40% chance of getting the postmark from the day they were mailed. That's a big deal to me. The whole thing was made much worse by the fact that election officials only ordered the ballots from the printer two days before the election.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/six-weeks-later-ele...

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.

> My understanding is that in most areas without existing voter suppression efforts anything postmarked by election day should be counted.

What happens when the postmark is not legible? I don't read postmarks often, but a good chunk of the time I can't make out the full date.

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!"

> 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!"

Yeah, other people are seeing that as his strategy, too:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/opinion/trump-election-da...

> There’s no mystery about what President Trump intends to do if he holds a lead on election night in November. He’s practically broadcasting it.

> First, he’ll claim victory. Then, having spent most of the year denouncing vote-by-mail as corrupt, fraudulent and prone to abuse, he’ll demand that authorities stop counting mail-in and absentee ballots. He’ll have teams of lawyers challenging counts and ballots across the country.

> He also seems to be counting on having the advantage of mail slowdowns, engineered by the recently installed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Fewer pickups and deliveries could mean more late-arriving ballots and a better shot at dismissing votes before they’re even opened, especially if the campaign has successfully sued to block states from extending deadlines. We might even see a Brooks Brothers riot or two, where well-heeled Republican operatives stage angry and voluble protests against ballot counts and recounts.

> If Trump is leading on election night, in other words, there’s a good chance he’ll try to disrupt and delegitimize the counting process. That way, if Joe Biden pulls ahead in the days (or weeks) after voting ends — if we experience a “blue shift” like the one in 2018, in which the Democratic majority in the House grew as votes came in — the president will have given himself grounds to reject the outcome as “fake news.”

> The only way to prevent this scenario, or at least, rob it of the oxygen it needs to burn, is to deliver an election night lead to Biden. This means voting in person. No, not everyone will be able to do that. But if you plan to vote against Trump and can take appropriate precautions, then some kind of hand delivery — going to the polls or bringing your mail-in ballot to a “drop box” — will be the best way to protect your vote from the president’s concerted attempt to undermine the election for his benefit.

yep, everyone needs to wear PPE and go to the polls

That is not true, see https://www.newsweek.com/these-states-invalidate-mail-ballot...

How long do they wait for the mails to arrive?

I know this is an annoying thing to say, but:

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

It sure is, but privatizing opens up an entire other can of worms. It'd be far easier to "disappear" someone's mail in a private corporation unless there is strong legal oversight. And that brings it back to having elected politicians controlling who's auditing the private delivery companies. It's a mess.

> 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.

Then who is left? Churches? Foreign governments?

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.

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

That wouldn't solve anything. If it's not controlled by elected politicians, it could still be controlled by others with political or ideological motivations, and it would be harder to hold those people accountable.

The real solution is political checks and balances and more oversight.

Mail in voting is going to make the hanging chads in Florida in 2000 seem like a nice memory.

In the best of times, the postal service was striving to deliver 96% of the ballots. Why would we sign up for automatic 4% disenfranchisement?

It is common for 20% or more of mailed in ballots to be invalidated for one reason or another. And that's just when its a normal year with absentee ballots as the ones in the mail.

Changing the election system during a pandemic with only months prior to the election is just asking for it. This sort of thing takes years to plan in the best of times.

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 which way those states tend to vote.

Well, many of those people also don't get to take Federal holidays off. See "Black Friday", "Presidents' Day Sale", etc.

Black Friday is not a federal holiday, its the day after a federal holiday, which many office workers customarily get off (but not retail workers as you mentioned).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_holidays_in_the_United...

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?

Florida's state govt has been in complete control of Republicans (all houses + gov) for over 30 years, despite Republican voter registrations being in the minority.

Are the Republicans really that strong in CA, NY, IL? If this is true, why not to do it at city level, surely there are not that many Republicans in the San Francisco, Seattle, or NYC city councils?

Seattle has mail-in ballots. So we don't need the day off

How does that help when some places have only one polling station for 100k people? And there is a global pandemic, so we don't want 100k people congregating in the same crowded space?

Do that, and set up a sensible network of polling places with appropriate opening hours so that everyone can vote easily without 100k people all turning up at the exact same time and trying to squeeze into the same crowded space.

Yeah, polling stations are dimensioned for typical turnout, which includes a majority voting by mail.

Not really. Minorities are routinely disenfranchised through polling station closures. See all the polling station closures during the primaries using COVID as the reason.

“Black voters, on average, wait 45 percent longer to vote than white voters; Latino voters wait 46 percent longer”

https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/613408/

See also the particularly egregious Kentucky example where they even tried to close the station while people were still in line.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/us-primaries-kentucky-1.562334...

The examples of this kind of suppression are sadly countless here in the US.

In-person voting is being stifled as well. Look at the Georgia primary.

https://www.npr.org/2020/06/09/873054620/long-lines-voting-m...

Mail-in ballots are so good that once you do them, you'll be dumbfounded at why this isn't the absolute standard country-wide. Like I can't describe how simple it is and nice to be able to research candidates on your own with the full ballot in front of you. Using phones and such is prohibited at in-person voting.

The other advantage is you aren't fully limited by the mail. There are drop-off bins at locations like public libraries.

We trust our mail to do nearly everything official with the government: your ID, vehicle registration, selective service number, passport, IRS PIN, jury summons, US census etc ALL come through the mail and ONLY through the mail, but for voting we don't??? why?!?

Voting in person means you can't prove how you voted. That makes it harder for someone to bribe or bully their way into office.

Because the whole point of Trump appointing an inexperienced postmaster general is to cripple the USPS to reduce voter turnout.

That might work in a normal election year, but this year that solution would still put people in a bind between risking getting a severe infectious disease and exercising their democratic rights.

As much as I'd like to see it be a holiday (because I think it places the right degree of emphasis on its importance), the reality is that voting by mail works great. In fact, living in Washington state and having voted absentee before VBM became universal... I'm not sure I've ever voted in a polling place (and I've got a lot of grey hair). I can't say enough good things about being able to take my time to research candidates and vote when it is convenient for my schedule, rather than some 9-8 window on a particular day.

Why is this flagged? A working postal system is a required element of many YC companies.

Direct election interference. Please call your elected representatives and demand action. There is no safe alternative to voting by mail in the middle of a pandemic that the Trump administration has completely bungled a response to.

We are watching the creation of a banana republic in realtime.

After reading the article it seems like it won't effect the election results - other then maybe making them take slightly longer? But even that seems unlikely.

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.

Marble cake, also the game

https://techcrunch.com/2009/04/21/4chan-takes-over-the-time-...

That's exactly my point. This article is critiquing ancient technology which can be tampered with by the ruling government that limits democratic involvement without proposing obvious remedies involving superior technology. The hidden subtext here through the intellectual dishonesty of its exclusion is that this technology would allow a little bit TOO much involvement from the electorate which is contrary to the entire design of American representative democracy which is purpose built to prop up candidates captured by big money corporate donors and PACs.

This isn't a technical problem that can be solved by technical solutions, and even technical solutions can be tampered with.

Everyone understands paper ballot technology. Very, very few people are going to understand a technically "superior" e-voting system that has all the right characteristics. I'd rather have the system that can be accurately understood verified by the public than one where the public has to completely trust a few dozen experts.

Arguably this is what happened with Trump - just indirectly.

But yes, internet voting is decades from ready.

If we can't trust the government, then we need to rely on our community.

Sounds like we need communities to band together and have a group collect & deliver mail-in ballots and make sure that people in charge of counting the ballots are onboard to ensure end-to-end compliance.

I will be standing in line this year. Covid be damned. Though, my next fear is that there will be a shortage of ballots in left-leaning areas.

Please don't incite criminal behavior. Under law, only certain people are authorized to deliver mail-in ballots -- typically family, elections staff, and postal workers.

Ballots have chain of custody issues, and it would be terribly easy for one party to organize a collection drive, look at the sender, and decide to save or recycle based on party affiliation of the voter. The thing that changed this year is the openly partisan affiliation of the United States Post Office, so the laws haven't been updated to remove them as from the chain of custody.

EDIT: I guess the law changed in California[1] to allow other people to carry ballots, so long as the voter signs for it. But other states don't have that freedom.

[1]: https://voterguide.sos.ca.gov/voter-info/vote-by-mail.htm

>Please don't incite criminal behavior

This is a gross oversimplification of morality. Regardless, I agree what the parent is proposing wouldn't work well.

I don't see a moral claim being made at all in my post. Morals are a completely different dimension than government law. I think you're conflating the two.

Your intentions are noble but there are very strict regulations as to who can handle ballots, the USPS being one of them.

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