Stop Panicking about the Post Office | Hacker News Reader

Stop Panicking about the Post Office

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19 pointsmidef8 comments

There is no panic about the (US) Post Office. The agency is under concerted attack by the President's men, and has already suffered serious damage. The President has explained in detail that a well-operating Post Office would prevent his re-election by delivering mail-in ballots favoring his opponent, and has acted to stop it.

Because the US Post Office couldn't handle even a Christmas rush of cards and packages. One ballot per person per year will absolutely crash that system.

That's the sort of thing that one would assume would create a news cycle, if the USPS failed to handle holiday shipping.

Chewing back through the archives of 2019 news, I don't see such a news cycle, or really anyone complaining about extraordinary delays. I do see that the Post Office did an unusual amount of gearing up because the distance between Thanksgiving and Christmas in 2019 shortened the peak shipping window (https://www.marketplace.org/2019/12/05/six-fewer-shipping-da...). But they appear to have handled it fine.

Here's their self-reported tracking metrics through 2019 Q4 on package delivery (https://about.usps.com/what/performance/service-performance/...). No real deviation from their regular numbers indicating a performance drop.

What's our source on the notion that they got crushed by Christmas rush?

It was sarcasm. My point being if they can handle the Christmas rush, they can handle an extra ballot per person once a year.

However, I suspect that the "USPS needs funding" narrative was stoked so congress would provide funds to make sure the blockchain voting system the USPS is implementing runs smooth.

Sarcasm is against the HN CoC.

We have yet to see whether, in its damaged condition, it could still handle the Christmas rush. With sorting machines unplugged and shipped off to warehouses or scrapped, with employees forbidden overtime to handle fluctuations, with hiring frozen, it is far from certain it can still handle votes. That is by design.

Sorry, I forgot the "/s" at the end.

Can anyone with real knowledge of the subject corroborate or dispute this? Genuinely interested. The article makes a lot of sense, and if true, disputes the popular narrative. But there is a big "if" and I am not qualified to know if this is true (hopefully) or just really well crafted to hide the truth.

But that would require disengaging the 24/7 chicken little fear narrative.

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