USPS Failed to Properly Handle Some Primary Election Ballots, Audit Finds | Hacker News Reader

USPS Failed to Properly Handle Some Primary Election Ballots, Audit Finds

propublica.org

48 pointshn_acker15 comments

> …deficiencies in how ballots were tracked and errors leading to delays, all of which risked ballots having incorrect postmarks or otherwise arriving late to election officials, which could lead to their rejection.

This is one reason why mail–in ballots should all be barcoded. The USPS would scan the barcode each time the envelope was handled generating a history that shows how it made its way through the postal system. The history of any ballot that arrived late could be examined to find out where the postal system failed.

As long as the barcode is not then used to reject delivery of ballots because a flawed federal voter verification system guesses the voters are illegitimate.

I have grave concerns about creating a single lever that will allow bad actors to steal elections.

Having to hijack a federal election commission is harder than taking over a few Republican Christian conservative districts.

Remember that is because of the FBI that black people in Georgia can vote.

To clarify, if the postal service can choose which ballots to deliver, then whoever controls the postal service has a powerful lever to suppress voters they don't like, especially those who have difficulty voting in person due to bad health, work obligations, distance to polling places, etc.

Nothing about the FEC.

Under the proposed rules, only the states would be able to determine who is eligible to vote. The postal service would not have discretion over which ones to deliver. If they failed to deliver any ballots then the tracking information for the ballots would show it right away.

That's not the story the whistleblower tells. The plan, for example, is to reject entire batches of ballots if a single ballot doesn't pass USPS's criteria.

Sure, that sounds scary. But the USPS’s criteria are all about the barcode, the envelope, etc. If the state cannot print envelopes that the USPS’s sorting machine can read then it will reject them. And if the very first one in a carton of mail is wrong, what are the odds any of the rest will be right?

> …a flawed federal voter verification system guesses the voters are illegitimate.

FWIW, the states don’t even know who is a citizen without verifying the registered voter’s information with the federal government. The federal government does not have to guess, since they are the source of truth.

The politicians and political appointees currently in charge want the system to fail, so they don’t share your same goal.

If you wanted to “lose” votes or delay them to the point they’re not counted (per new laws introduce by GOP politicians recently), what would you do differently?

They want to cast enough doubt on the results of the election that they can ask the SCOTUS to decide the outcome of the election instead of voters, like what was done in the 2000 presidential election.

I want to know what percent of normal mail gets mishandled at any stage of the process. The audit found that 99% of the election mail was handled by the book so that is what would tell me if this is just “the post office ain’t perfect” as opposed to there being malicious intent.

USPS Successfully Mishandles Specific Ballots

TFA does not suggest malicious intent on the part of USPS. When government bodies lower in the hierarchy receive foreseeably impractical (or malicious) orders from above, even a good faith effort to implement them will result in chaos.

The original title is:

> U.S. Postal Service Failed to Properly Handle Some Ballots During This Year’s Primary Elections, Audit Finds

Well yeah, they’ve literally been (illegally) ordered to do this.

Of course they did. The president wants them to, he complains about mail-in voting (despite doing it himself yearly...), and thinks it helps his opponents. He also picked the postmaster general.

None of this is news, and none of it is a conspiracy. He has made it explicit that this is what he wants, and he's doing it to disenfranchise people so his team wins.

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