
The Post Office Is Deactivating Mail Sorting Machines Ahead of the Election - cryptoz
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/n7wk9z/the-post-office-is-deactivating-mail-sorting-machines-ahead-of-the-election
======
erentz
Posted this article separately but it was flagged. The quiet part has been
said out loud by the president. The motivations have been made clear here and
the speculation about why this is happening ends there IMO:

> “They need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take
> all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said in an interview
> with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo. “If they don’t get those two items,
> that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not
> equipped to have it.”

[https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/13/donald-
trump...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/13/donald-trump-usps-
post-office-election-funding)

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strict9
My father in law works for the USPS and mentioned the elimination of these
machines as well as elimination of overtime about a month ago.

It's being described as a result of a massive decrease in flat mail. From the
local union newsletter:

 _" On 5-15-2020 USPS announced a National Equipment Reduction Plan to remove
and scrap 671 pieces of equipment nationwide. ... USPS is scrapping and not
relocating these machines because they don't see the mail coming back."_

The 5/15 date is interesting because it's about a week after the new
Postmaster/CEO was appointed. [0]

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_DeJoy#U.S._Postmaster_Ge...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_DeJoy#U.S._Postmaster_General_and_CEO)

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seizethecheese
We do just in time shipping on top of the post office, so have visibility
here. We're definitely seeing mail being delivered more slowly, with more
delays. At the same time, it's a question of degree, not a major dismantling
of the post office. I'd guess 90% of our packages are still arriving within a
day of when they were supposed to.

For context, I run bottomless.com, YCW19. We're shipping hundreds of packages
from dozens of locations around the US every day.

~~~
huy-nguyen
You can do a great public service by publishing a metric of postal mail
delivery timeliness from across the country.

~~~
seizethecheese
Agreed. We are thinking about it. I really don’t want us to get involved in a
partisan debate, but presenting the facts might inform the discussion overall.

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jandrese
My understanding is that in most areas without existing voter suppression
efforts anything postmarked by election day should be counted. This will
probably delay the announcement of the winner unless it is a landslide, which
is not really that big of a deal unless you are a cable new channel that feels
it is necessary to have 24/7 coverage of the election until the winner is
announced.

~~~
jgacook
This is untrue - different states have different standards by which mail in
ballots will be counted. A postmark on or before Election Day is no guarantee
your vote will be tallied, depending on where you live.

~~~
jefurii
And in places like California which take a long time to count ballots they
usually announce results and the election is effectvely over before everything
is counted.

~~~
jandrese
Most places will make the announcement once the outstanding ballots are
extremely unlikely to change the result of the election.

So if Candidate A is winning 500,000 to 400,000 but 150,000 ballots are still
outstanding then they'll make the call for Candidate A because there is no
reason to think that the outstanding ballots will be that much different in
distribution than the already counted ballots. This can be adjusted based on
historical precedent as well, if you know that late counting precincts tend to
vote in a certain way then you can make educated guesses as to when the
results of that precinct will no longer make a difference. Even after adding
in some extra margin for safety you can call the race.

The tricky part is when a race is really close and you have to count every
ballot. This is when waiting 3-5 days for the mail to finish trickling in is
going to cause cable news anchors to lose sleep.

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BurningFrog
I know this is an annoying thing to say, but:

This is an argument for not having mail delivery being controlled by elected
politicians.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _This is an argument for not having mail delivery being controlled by
> elected politicians._

Which is not the same thing as having mail delivery being controlled by
private companies, who are even less answerable to the public than elected
politicians.

~~~
BurningFrog
Then who is left? Churches? Foreign governments?

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tomohawk
Mail in voting is going to make the hanging chads in Florida in 2000 seem like
a nice memory.

In the best of times, the postal service was striving to deliver 96% of the
ballots. Why would we sign up for automatic 4% disenfranchisement?

It is common for 20% or more of mailed in ballots to be invalidated for one
reason or another. And that's just when its a normal year with absentee
ballots as the ones in the mail.

Changing the election system during a pandemic with only months prior to the
election is just asking for it. This sort of thing takes years to plan in the
best of times.

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zalkota
How about we don’t have a mail in vote and just make the day a holiday.

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
We've actively lobbied for that for years--Republicans have refused, because
they know that the people working low-income jobs whose managers will not let
them off to go vote tend to lean Democratic.

There are some states where the best we've managed is being allowed to take
"unpaid" time off to go vote, with the caveat that your employer cannot fire
you for doing so. Some states don't even have _that_ much. Guess which way
those states tend to vote.

~~~
bfieidhbrjr
If you've actively lobbied for that for years, in multiple states and those
darn Republicans refused it... Then those years would include times when there
was a Democrat president and congress, and governors.

So maybe blaming the other side is just politically convenient?

~~~
Lendal
Florida's state govt has been in complete control of Republicans (all houses +
gov) for over 30 years, despite Republican voter registrations being in the
minority.

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alex_young
Why is this flagged? A working postal system is a required element of many YC
companies.

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jgacook
Direct election interference. Please call your elected representatives and
demand action. There is no safe alternative to voting by mail in the middle of
a pandemic that the Trump administration has completely bungled a response to.

We are watching the creation of a banana republic in realtime.

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Miner49er
After reading the article it seems like it won't effect the election results -
other then maybe making them take slightly longer? But even that seems
unlikely.

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shiado
If only there was a communication medium which travelled at the speed of light
and 100 years of research in information theory and cryptography which would
allow secure auditable verifiable elections from the comfort of home. Nah lets
use pre-telegraph technology.

~~~
dwhit
Do not ever allow an election for who gets to control the nukes be decided by
an e-vote. I don’t want Boaty McBoatface to be the president.

~~~
shiado
That's exactly my point. This article is critiquing ancient technology which
can be tampered with by the ruling government that limits democratic
involvement without proposing obvious remedies involving superior technology.
The hidden subtext here through the intellectual dishonesty of its exclusion
is that this technology would allow a little bit TOO much involvement from the
electorate which is contrary to the entire design of American representative
democracy which is purpose built to prop up candidates captured by big money
corporate donors and PACs.

~~~
ardy42
This isn't a technical problem that can be solved by technical solutions, and
even technical solutions can be tampered with.

Everyone understands paper ballot technology. Very, very few people are going
to understand a technically "superior" e-voting system that has all the right
characteristics. I'd rather have the system that can be accurately understood
verified by the public than one where the public has to completely trust a few
dozen experts.

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mywittyname
If we can't trust the government, then we need to rely on our community.

Sounds like we need communities to band together and have a group collect &
deliver mail-in ballots and make sure that people in charge of counting the
ballots are onboard to ensure end-to-end compliance.

I will be standing in line this year. Covid be damned. Though, my next fear is
that there will be a shortage of ballots in left-leaning areas.

~~~
labster
Please don't incite criminal behavior. Under law, only certain people are
authorized to deliver mail-in ballots -- typically family, elections staff,
and postal workers.

Ballots have chain of custody issues, and it would be terribly easy for one
party to organize a collection drive, look at the sender, and decide to save
or recycle based on party affiliation of the voter. The thing that changed
this year is the openly partisan affiliation of the United States Post Office,
so the laws haven't been updated to remove them as from the chain of custody.

EDIT: I guess the law changed in California[1] to allow other people to carry
ballots, so long as the voter signs for it. But other states don't have that
freedom.

[1]: [https://voterguide.sos.ca.gov/voter-info/vote-by-
mail.htm](https://voterguide.sos.ca.gov/voter-info/vote-by-mail.htm)

~~~
happytoexplain
>Please don't incite criminal behavior

This is a gross oversimplification of morality. Regardless, I agree what the
parent is proposing wouldn't work well.

~~~
labster
I don't see a moral claim being made at all in my post. Morals are a
completely different dimension than government law. I think you're conflating
the two.

