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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
So it is not unprecedented.
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.
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 used to get a couple a day (mass-mailed banking/internet/etc advertisements), but it seems to have tapered off with the pandemic.
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
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.
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.