
The machines USPS is removing can sort more than 36,000 pieces of mail per hour - woldemariam
https://www.businessinsider.com/usps-mail-sorting-machines-how-they-work-in-photos-2020-8
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missedthecue
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.

~~~
jinushaun
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.

~~~
savanaly
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.

~~~
zjs
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.

~~~
gremlinsinc
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.

~~~
dragonwriter
> 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.

~~~
gremlinsinc
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).

------
Rebelgecko
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)

~~~
djaque
> 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.

~~~
Rebelgecko
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

~~~
schwartzworld
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

~~~
Rebelgecko
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.

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EFruit
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.

~~~
organsnyder
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.

~~~
pxeboot
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?

~~~
sangli
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.

~~~
toast0
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.

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

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

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djaque
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.

~~~
mikelward
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...](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/brace-blue-
shift/615097)

~~~
scsilver
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.

------
yters
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.

~~~
technofiend
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...](https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/usps-remote-encoding-facility)

------
jimjimjimmy
Mail gets lost, do we want lost votes?

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/covid-...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/covid-19-vote-
by-mail-ballot-counted-election/)

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

~~~
mhh__
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.

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

~~~
mhh__
Why?

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

~~~
mhh__
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

~~~
mikelward
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](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrutineer)

------
lma21
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?

