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Comment by zjs | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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