The machines USPS is removing can sort more than 36,000 pieces of mail per hour | Hacker News Reader

The machines USPS is removing can sort more than 36,000 pieces of mail per hour

businessinsider.com

131 pointswoldemariam94 comments

I heard that this was because mail volume is falling through the floor while parcel volume is nearing record highs each day.

Given that there only a limited amount of floor space in mail sorting facilities, it makes sense to remove unneeded letter sorting machines to replace with parcel sorting machines.

Except you’re going to have an unprecedented amount of letter mail coming in November! These changes should have occurred post election, if cost was a concern.

How so? People regularly get several pieces of legitimate mail per week, not even counting spam which if you did they get countless pieces of mail per week. How can one extra piece of mail for the entire year cause an “unprecedented" volume? Maybe if voting involved daily notices being sent out for weeks on end it might move the needle but the presidential election is a far cry from that.

I'm sure a lot has changed since I worked in a mailroom ~15 years ago, but I think there's at least two important factors here:

1. Bulk mail is slow. First class mail takes a few days to be delivered. Bulk mail may take a couple weeks.

2. Bulk mail must be sorted and grouped. Depending on volume, you're sorting by either zip or zip+4. This is easy to do when you can just sort your mail merge file so that you print in the sorted order. For presorted mail, sorting machines aren't needed.

Basically, completed ballots are going to be flowing in the direction the mail system isn't optimized for. I'm sure they'll all get there eventually, but ensuring they all arrive at the right place in time to be counted is the hard part.

Maybe we make the Post Office ALSO the Office of Elections and run them nationally or in partnership w/ locals.

You can vote in person at an post office for 30 days before. No need for polling locations, no need for staffing vulnerable elderly people. Just go into a post office and vote. Get a receipt showing your vote, that is verifiable online with the receipt#.

Say, any postal worker can validate a vote. They don't look at your vote, they only look at your information and validate it against your voting record via an app, then you vote, hand it back to them and they notarize the envelope or put a seal on it saying it's valid. Once that happens there's no question to validity of ballots. No ballots tossed.

Any mail carrier can do this, so elderly home-ridden folks could request a mail carrier take their vote at home.

> Maybe we make the Post Office ALSO the Office of Elections and run them nationally or in partnership w/ locals.

Aside from the Constitutional issues that raises, the Post Office was disbanded almost 50 years ago and replaced with a government-owned self-financed corporation, the Postal Service.

So, first, we'd have to re-establish the Post Office.

My point is pop-up election booths is a bit assinine. Very error prone. Waste of tax-payer dollars, just put that money the state would pay into the Post Office coffers, and let them handle ALL aspects of elections (w/ some collaboration so they follow local laws / election guidelines since it's at a state level).

So basically you want to put elections under the supervision of someone like Trump.

The cheapest rate is 'everyone gets one' which requires no sorting.

The second cheapest rate is carrier route sorting, where you sort by zip+4 and also put it in the exact order the carrier takes on that route to deliver mail. Also does not require mail sorting.

Some people get mail every week. Not everyone does. And certainly not all at the same time.

I've worked a logistics building before. The single worst day of the entire month was the day TV Guide went out. The entire facility was drowning in TV guides, with a box going to every grocery store in the country.

Imagine that, but orders of magnitude more deliveries. And then take out the sorting equipment.

At least where I live, ballots don't all go out on the same day. Nor are they returned on the same day. Plus I'd imagine that mailing out 200 million ballots pales in comparison to the December rush at the post office

I go months without receiving legitimate mail. Basically only when some company changes something in a contract and such. And the tax office every now and then of course.

> How can one extra pieceof mail for the entire year cause an "unprecedented" volume?

Yeah I don't understand it either. McDonald's sell 2 billion burgers a year but when I ordered one million at the drive-thru it caused their system to crash.

(Not me, somebody said this on Twitter first.)

I don't follow. Is that intended to reveal a flaw in the argument or is just a joke?

In our lifetime an election coinciding with a pandemic is unprecedented. There will be, again in our lifetime, with our logistics afforded by modern technology, an unprecedented number of ballots cast by mail.

Casual use of language riled dad up. Give him his clicker and lean the recliner back for him. He’ll calm down.

You know basically every point in history is somehow “unprecedented”. It’s never been that way before!

Save it for when dad says it’s really special though.

There's way more mail during the holidays than what would be generated by a national mail-in election.

So it is not unprecedented.

I have a question in regards to voter fraud mitigation: Exactly how would you ensure a person or identity is not deceased? We received a mail-in ballot for my grandmother the other day and she passed away in 2017.

That's very inconsiderate and unfortunate. I'm sorry, both for your loss and the recurring reminder.

Please tell both your county and state that she's passed.

Election administration in jurisdictions I studied have data feeds for deaths. Her death certificate and her voter registration details were not properly matched. It happens. Record linking across disparate demographic databases is not perfect.

Generally, but YMMV:

States admin their statewide voter registration (VRDB), with the largest counties co-managing their own subset. Some groups of states share their VRDBs, to better scrub for changes of address and so forth.

County auditors (or equiv) conduct election administration. Like candidate filing, issuing ballots, signature verification, tabulation.

In a perfect world, someone would notice if a postal ballot was signed and dated after your grandma passed.

Most states/counties/municipalities have electronic death registration systems. For the vast majority of deceased voters, the EDRS will have been correctly filed, and a death certificate issued. At least, this is how things are supposed to work... Anything at government scale is hard.

I'm pretty sure the ballots haven't gone out yet. You probably received a registration form.

They may have recieved a ballot for a different contest. Washington state recently had state wide primaries, other states may have primaries going on now, or whatever local elections are happening.

they cross reference it some how. CNN had someone on from Washington State who said they received less than 200 ballots from deceased individuals in the last election so they are able to track it and ignore them.

https://www.archives.gov/research/vital-records

No. Two extra letters per household (one ballot, then one returned ballot), largely spread out over days or weeks, is just not that much more volume for the USPS. That's of course the maximum; in practice the average per household will be much lower than that. Further, as stated elsewhere, non-package mail volume has collapsed because of COVID19.

What does matter is the backend, the infrastructure for counties and states that previously did not use mail ballots, or only used them for absentee voting, to a) properly send them out to the right recipients, then b) accept and process them. All this a) of course has to be done by early October to give voters a month before election day, and b) has nothing to do with the USPS.

I think you make a good point, but little nitpick, many (most?) households have more than one adult.

Multiply the junk mail by the same number of adults.

I used to get a couple a day (mass-mailed banking/internet/etc advertisements), but it seems to have tapered off with the pandemic.

True. But my larger point is that even aside from the current drop in overall USPS non-package volume, the USPS has a lot of experience in handling lots of mail. Think of every adult in every household receiving tax documents from the IRS and every employer, bank, and other financial company in January, then many/most of those same adults mailing tax returns to the IRS and state tax agencies by April 15.

Christmas cards volume would dwarf election volume easily. You are looking at a many to many relationship vs a finite number of ballots.

No you are not. The PO handles over four hundred million pieces of mail PER day. The amount, even if every voter used the mail and every voter mailed it on the same day, would not overload their system. Heck it won't even reach sorting facilities all at the same time and some will lag over three days

All you have to remember about this story is, Democrats have promised to bail out the pension system of the Post Office and so the union representing them has thrown their support behind all DNC candidates.

You do realize that the big unspoken promise with an all Democrat Washington is they are to shore up ALL public employee pension systems which would make the debt that even Trump and the pandemic ran up look like pocket change.

America is on its way to be fleeced and the irrationals are lining up because they stopped thinking long ago when hate took over

Explicitly funding defined-benefit pension obligations is more like the reckoning from fleecing that took place long ago. If you philosophically agree with the 2006 mandate that USPS prefund its pension, then you should accept that USPS needs increased funding to implement it.

With regards to fleecing in general, both parties are in on the game (see: all that newly printed money propping up the stock market, for a less partisan example). But at least one of these parties isn't trying to actively undermine the stability of the country by helping a pandemic spread unchecked or fueling race riots. Like it or not, the Democratic Party has become the conservative option.

The prefunding period ended in 2016. It is not too blame for current money losing word.

I don't know how that goal has actually progressed - governmental deadlines are often pushed and there are plenty of ways to technically meet the deadline by taking on other debt. The comment I was responding to was talking about increasing funding as "bailing out" the pensions, so they at least think the pension is still a problem.

As far as the USPS costing money to run in current world conditions. First it is a public service, of course it costs money. Second, since its rates are set by congress, congress could easily fix the problem by changing the rates.

There are only 78 days until the election. At this point, even the appearance of meddling with the mail before a record mail-in election is unacceptable.

I know some postal workers due to a family relationship. They've had sorting machines removed, but said personal and business mail has actually been increased since March... So it appears, from an n=3, that "declining mail volume" is untrue.

That is not the case at all. There is no need to speculate as the President has made his rationale clear:

> President Donald Trump frankly acknowledged that he’s starving the U.S. Postal Service of money to make it harder to process an expected surge of mail-in ballots, which he worries could cost him reelection.

https://apnews.com/ece1f6e9cea1b2aa0a8c6af7ca003f26

This is clickbait fake news, created by taking a statement out of context.

What actually happened is a he-said-she-said situation between the Democrats and Republicans with the new covid relief bill. Democrats came in wanting $3.4 trillion dollars, Republicans aren't willing to pay that much and said "we'll talk if you bring it down to $1 trillion".

According to the Democrats, they did and the Republicans still refused to talk.

According to the Republicans, they only went down to $2 trillion and are refusing to go further.

The post office funding was only $25 billion (of which, $3.5 billion was for the mail-in ballots). Trump isn't against this. He wants the relief to mostly go to the people, not as bail-out money to the states with funding issues (which were having issues long before the pandemic, and are now just trying to use it as an excuse to get free money).

The original context of the statement everyone's railing on was just part of than explanation of the situation, not any statement of motivation.

The original audio people got in an uproar about: https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1293896544668782592 (it's 29 seconds long and there's no context, he's just explaining that the stalled bill contains the post office funding)

Here's a statement Trump made later explaining the above: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2020/08/13/trump-on-funding-the-p... (between 2:35 and 3:15, Trump is explaining what he's actually against - and it's not the post office)

And finally, some real reporting from just before everyone started blowing up: https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2020/08/12/trump-co... (and a no-paywall archive: http://archive.is/6dEi9 )

> “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.”

Yes, that is part of the clipped audio, without the surrounding context. There's no motivation stated there. He's referring to Democrats refusing to come to an agreement on a bill that would give them what they want if only they were willing to compromise on other parts of it.

That doesn't look like a quote, that looks like an editorial opinion. Trump is usually pretty good on consistent messaging - I doubt he said he was worried about it costing him the reelection.

There are legitimate reasons to want a voting system to be hostile to to distance voting. The system moves from a place where anyone can verify that parts are working to one where expert specialists can - maybe - verify that parts of the system are working. It creates new points of failure where corruption can creep in. Voting systems are one of the best places to adopt a slow and conservative approach to change.

I should have gone straight to the source, my apologies for that. I also took for granted that everyone would consider the AP an unbiased news source. They still certainly are in my book, but I am open to be proven wrong.

As another user was kind enough to post:

While this is part of a larger story, as another user pointed out, it does not take away from the fact that the President made his rationale clear for not wanting a functional U.S. Postal Service.

He didn't have to "say the quiet part aloud," but he did. It is an incontrovertible fact.

edit:

On top of everything, the USPS is enshrined in Article 1 of the constitution. [0]

> Power to Protect the Mails

> The postal powers of Congress embrace all measures necessary to insure the safe and speedy transit and prompt delivery of the mails.

I am just beginning to absorb this information, but at the very least, by their own inaction the US Congress is derelict of their constitutionally mandated duties, correct? If so, I believe they should be held accountable in the court of public opinion, at the very least.

Where my Originalists at?

[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C7-1-...

That's the AP's wholly unfounded interpretation of what Trump said. Later on the article quotes him as saying

>"They want $3.5 billion for something that will turn out to be fraudulent. That’s election money, basically," Trump said during Thursday’s call-in interview.

As I wrote elsewhere, the difficulty with a large-scale increase in mail ballots does not lie with the USPS, but with states and counties without experience with mail ballots, or only with mail absentee votes, that needs to set up the infrastructure to mail them only to eligible voters and receive and process them in November. That's tough to do by early October (giving voters 30 days before Election Day).

"Wholly unfounded" ???

“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.”

As I quoted earlier, Trump pointed out the fraud potential in doing so, especially given the little time remaining before ballots have to go out.

There isn't really any fraud. Oregon, a state with mail-on voting only, has a actual fraud rate of 1 in a million. One ballot per year is fraudulent. [1]

This isn't about preventing fraud. Mail-in is proven to be secure. Take the words as exactly what they are--limiting votes. He directly states he wants to limit votes. There's no need to try searching around for other meanings when his statement is so direct.

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/06/02/low-rates-o...

>There isn't really any fraud. Oregon, a state with mail-on voting only, has a actual fraud rate of 1 in a million. One ballot per year is fraudulent.

Oregon has also been 100% vote-by-mail for two decades. Other states cannot replicate Oregon's experience and infrastructure—often from scratch—by early October.

If only there were some way for people and institutions to learn from the experience of others...

What a specious argument.

If underfunding the post office could combat fraud, that argument would make sense. In reality, a dysfunctional post office will have little effect on highly motivated fraudsters and will disenfranchise the millions of people for whom vote-by-mail isn't a mere convenience.

In fact Trump's rhetoric will be especially motivating for pro-Trump fraudsters who will feel morally vindicated by the endless accusations of fraud by Democrats.

You raise a good point. When Trump throws out an accusation, it's generally a smoke screen to distract from his own malfeasance. His campaign managers have to know that he's lost the moderate vote by gross incompetence and failure to lead. Perhaps the entire goal is to induce fraudulent voting by his remaining supporters.

"Mail in voting" and "absentee voting" are two separate things. Trump issue is with the former, and has repeatedly advocated for the latter.

That is a myth, they aren’t separate things. It’s just semantics which are being manipulated for political purposes. Trump, for example, is voting in the election under Florida’s “vote by mail” option because that’s what it’s called there.

https://dos.myflorida.com/elections/for-voters/voting/

Occams Razor dude.

This sounds like the kind of semi-meaningful answer you can expect to cover up the real answer: corruption.

Even so, how was he able to determine that this was the right action in the short amount of time he has been on the job?

Correct. Volume of flats (exactly what it sounds like; mail that can be bent, basically) has plummetted since COVID19 began, while Priority Mail is no longer 2-3 days to anywhere in the US.

All of this uproar about sorting machines is really frustrating to me, because no one seems to be writing about the utilization of the existing machines. If they were previously only 50% utilized, this seems like a reasonable thing to do for efficiency (kind of like how the post office (re)moves thousands of collection boxes every single due to lack of use, but everyone is suddenly upset because they're removing a dozen boxes in Middle of Nowhere, Montana that only get a few letters per day)

> no one seems to be writing about the utilization of the existing machines

First off, that's wrong. Like three of the top comments here are talking about it.

Second, if it's about efficiency then it needs to wait until after our record mail-in election. There is no excuse for providing even so much as the image of election tampering.

To clarify, I mean that no one is talking about actual real numbers wrt utilization. It's all speculation.

Let's say we give USPS the benefit of the doubt and assume that these machines are unnecessary. It would be irresponsible to keep using them because of the election. If the linked article is correct that these machines typically have 2 employees assigned to them each, there could be a thousand employees or more whose work is totally pointless. I would much prefer that those 1000 employees be reassigned to do useful work instead of this boondoggle. Is it better to assign 1000 workers to perform "productivity theater" instead of having them help with the mail? IMO it isn't.

What's more like election tampering?

1. Reassigning redundant workers to more useful tasks

2. Misappropriating the labor of 1000 employees to avoid the appearance of election tampering

wouldn't it make sense to stop using the machines before irreversibly moving them? it takes one person to drive my car, but if I don't need it, I just don't use it. nobody needs to staff the car when not in use

According to a CNN article I read, many of these machines have already been sitting inactive for some time. I dunno how mail facilities are set up, bit perhaps there's a better use of space. I also don't think the removal is irreversible. For the most parts the removals can be reversed by putting them back (although a few of the inactive machines have already been stripped for spare parts)

In the long run, it's inefficient to keep paying for a car you're not using. You'd save money by canceling the car insurance and not renewing the registration. If your family has more cars than people, it may be the fiscally smartest option to sell your spare car, especially if your kids are off at college and car usage has been trending downwards for years.

Thinking from a different perspective, in a majority mail-in election, could these machines pose a risk to the election's integrity? They would most likely not be undergoing the same scrutiny as electronic voting systems (which in many places is already a very low bar...), and they are most likely vulnerable to as many other problems and exploits as any other system.

They're not responsible for counting votes. In many states (maybe most/all?), there is additional tracking done by the state department overseeing the elections to track when ballots are received. For instance, in Michigan I can check the MI Secretary of State's website to verify that my ballot has been counted.

Hypothetically, could they could be used to 'accidentally" route hundreds of ballots from an important zip code through nowhere Alaska, causing them to be delayed weeks/months and not counted?

Quite possibly, but this would be easily detectable after the fact as standard mail-in voting practices provide end-to-end tracking of the ballot. Most election security measures, including ballot stuffing in most systems, are really only detected after the fact.

I worked for a company that manufactured these machines including electro-mechanical systems as well as the software that used for configuration and generating reports.

The way it works is, these machines would either read the printed barcode or take a picture of the label and run through OCR engine, use the zip+4 and sort them to a bin based on some configuration. Then these bins would go on a truck to their destination.

The machines are not doing the routing. So your fears are unfounded.

How is sorting into a bin that goes onto a truck not routing?

Presumably different bins are set to go onto different trucks, and if the important county elections official's barcode/zip+4 gets binned to alaska, that could cause confusion and delay. More nefarious (and also more unlikely) would be if ballots sent out to zip+4 with registered X party gets binned wrong, delaying receipt of ballots, perhaps.

Although, I would expect there's likely enough volume of returned ballots to fill their own bin, and whoever puts the bins on the truck is going to notice if they're on the wrong truck.

Because what the machines do is sorting. Routing is totally different part of it. They are two different and distinct parts.

If it’s sorted wrong it’s routed wrong.. bit pedantic

Let's not sit around and speculate. Do you have any data to back up your claim that sorting machines undermine election security? If there's any truth here then surely states that have been voting by mail for decades would have noticed.

You generally start with a hypothesis before conducting research. There is likely no research yet.

I am genuinely concerned for the November election.

Even putting the dismantling of the USPS in the most favorable light, president Trump has managed to convince a chunk of his base that this year's presidential election will not be legitimate. We may end up in a situation where Donald Trump loses and part of the country truly believes the Biden was elected illegitimately.

I'm not sure what will happen, but it won't be good for our democracy.

This article argues that the mail-in ballots will favor Democrats, and that close calls on election night will turn into clear wins for Democrats once all the mail-in ballots are counted. With people being used to news media "calling" the election on election night, before the result is official, and with Trump calling the legitimacy of the election into doubt, it could get messy.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/brace-blue...

The interesting part is him pulling off this stalemate and not having a clear winner doesnt result in the president gaining legal power past the end of his term, it just puts the power back to the house (if the states have their elections, with pelosi likely being acting president) or the senate if no house memebers are elected, Republicans losing 23 to 12 democratic senators this term. If there is no election dems regain the executive and the senate.

I don't get how their address recognition technology seems to work so well with all the handwritten addresses. I am assuming it is mostly automated.

The answer is if a machine can't decode it, a human does.

One of my aunts worked as a postal worker for a while many years ago. She was hired for her ability to both read and type quickly. She reviewed addresses that couldn't be automatically recognized and did some sort of encoding that (I believe) generated that yellow printed barcode you see on some letters.

At least according to Atlas Obscura OCR has improved to the point that there's only one remote encoding site left and it's in Salt Lake City.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/usps-remote-encoding-fac...

OCR of handwriting has come a long way, but it's a lot easier to do a good job when you have a database of every valid address and can bounce your OCR probabilities off that database to fuzzy match your way there.

A very high volume of mail is machine addressed (much of it uses printed address barcodes too). Many people have legible handwriting, so those can get a barcode added when they hit the system. The remaining letters addressed by people like me can get exception processing. If the zip code is legible, at least it can route to the right post office and get figured out there, otherwise, it can make its way to a dead letter office for help.

I assume they disambiguate using the zip code. If you've got the correct zip code (or even just part of the correct zip code) you can really narrow things down.

I don't have the best handwriting, but I always try to write the zip code legibly on the assumption that if my letter gets to the right neighborhood, the local post office will be able to recognize the full address easily enough.

Handwriting recognition is like the canonical problem to solve, that they teach in the introduction to every textbook. The USPS has billions of letters. You would expect they have it right by now.

Mail gets lost, do we want lost votes?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/covid-...

The answer should therefore not be "withhold funding to increase rates of lost mail".

Eliminating polling stations, like what's happened in Kentucky, decreases the rate of voting. Voter ID laws prevent people from voting. Purging voters from registration rolls prevents people from voting. If you want to compare voter suppression methods, I've got news for you: lost mail is not what should keep you up at night.

Ever heard of "hanging chads"? There is no perfect system.

There is no perfect system? In the UK we have fully paper elections that basically run without a hitch year on year. Why do you need a voting machine at all? They just give you a pencil in the booth

I do see people arguing in the UK for electronic voting and Blockchain, which is worrying.

The UK has a fairly simple election system: you don't vote in many elections and generally not very many at once (maybe three or so at max if there's general elections and local elections happening at the same time). The US has many more elected positions that any given voter can be given. While it's easy to imagine that there's maybe one or two more ballots to fill in for e.g. the presidential election, in reality a voter on election day in the US may be voting in near 100 different elections for posts all the way from the local level to the national level. Marking, collecting, and counting these votes is an effort on another level from what the UK system deals with, and even filling in the ballot is not a trivial task (especially with the focus on being able to automatically count the votes).

There's a lot of scope for technology to improve this system, and a lot of improvements which can be made to the technology which is already there, though I do believe you either need a paper trail (which is less convenient and harder for an individual voter to verify their vote was counted, but a lot easier to explain how the system works and is hard to tamper with and preserve anonymity of the vote), or a clear open cryptographic voting system (which has more convenience and may be able to produce greater trust in the system, but it's much harder to explain how it works and preserving anonymity is much harder. 'Blockchain' contributes nothing to this BTW, it's more or less a completely different class of protocols).

The current situation in some US states where there's black-box electronic voting machines which just output a count at the end of the day and don't even have particularly good security to prevent someone who isn't the government or manufacturer from tampering with them is an awful state of affairs (though thankfully they do seem to be falling out of favor after some backlash).

Let's all hope that they do not give you a PENCIL of all things to fill out a ballot with.

They do in the UK: you can bring a pen if you want, but you should probably make sure it's something which quick drying ink so it's not likely to mark other parts of the ballot when its folded. In terms of tampering with the ballots it really doesn't make much difference: there are ways which are far easier to pull off and harder to detect to tamper with them than erasing pencil marks, and the way the election system is designed to protect against those ways also effectively prevents any issue with what was used to mark the ballots.

They do, in the UK. Supposedly this is due to the possibility of pens containing disappearing ink. More likely this is to avoid ink being accidentally smeared across the ballot, since it has to be folded.

Why?

Presumably because a ballot filled out in pencil is not immutable — the pencil marks could be erased!

That's why the sealed ballot boxes are accompanied by by two officers and the candidates are all present at the count.

If you tampered with the ballot it would only be discarded due to the rubber marking in the "wrong" box

I don't know about the UK, but in Australia it's attended by the candidates' representatives, called "scrutineers". The counting is done at the polling place, so the candidates can't be multiple places at once.

I've scrutineered before, and it all seemed to work well.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrutineer

As long as the loss is small and well distributed, it's kind of ok.

And the solution is to dismantle the USPS?

We're seeing major things happening around the world. The biggest of them is seeing the US slowly head into an autocracy (quite implicitly). Trump is doing whatever Trump wants, and no one is stopping him. How so?

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