First, so that it can be privatized and turned over to the free market, for which I will offer no opinion. That can be argued effectively to no real end on both sides, similar to a discussion about Amtrak or farming subsidies.
Second, the fact that the Postmaster is a Trump acolyte in an election year where there will be a record number of vote-by-mail responses should tell you all you need to know about what the true motivations are.
Mail in ballots still need to get to the voter before Election Day. If the voter doesn’t deliver it to a post office or a poll station before Election Day it doesn’t get counted. Can you imagine how pissed people will be if Election Day rolls around and fewer than 50% of mail-in voters have been delivered ballots? Taxation without representation doesn’t go over well in the USA.
Yes, people can go to a polling place and file a provisional, but the whole point of mail-in is so we don’t have to. Also, with COVID affecting older people more than younger, there may be a shortage of poll workers.
Also prep time: The county election office needs a reliable estimate of how long the mail leg will take so they can target the process of printing and sending the voter package. They need to be able to print some of the packages on short notice for newly registered voters and party affiliation changes.
If that's an accurate description of the delay, then I agree.
However, I've seen tweets suggesting that recent (since COVID lockdowns) delays of more than a week are currently not uncommon and I don't have any evidence that the USPS is shrinking their backlog right now. Given the current trajectory (eg. the current Postmaster General is denying overtime), I expect the possibility of many ballots missing delivery by Election Day unless USPS prioritizes those deliveries.
you may be correct - however, a lot of voter suppression is comparatively soft. more along the lines of discouragement. remove polling places, cause long lines, that gets on the news, people don’t bother to go after they get off work.
At least in MD ballots just need to be postmarked by Election Day to be counted. What states require ballots to arrive by Election Day? That seems like a much less transparent policy unless there are guarantees on delivery time...
I'm imagining massive pressure on Biden to concede before mail-in votes are counted, maybe combined with a 2000-style lawsuit that delays things even more.
Not outside the realm of possible, but why do that if you can achieve the same goal in subtler ways? 2000 was a “close call” because 10s of thousands of people in primarily-black communities in florida had their voting infra degraded to the point of uselessness. Voting infra is a proven strategy to tip the scales towards the kleptocrats
Say I am an Oregon resident who can vote by mail by default. This election season, I'm stuck at my job site in North Carolina. I can request Oregon mail by ballot to my location in NC then vote and mail it back. As long as it is postmarked before the election ends I'm good and my vote makes it in to be counted.
But what if it takes 2 weeks to get from Oregon to NC then back from NC to Oregon? And then another week to be handled last mile and finally gets to the office? It gets to the right place and is counted weeks after the election ends and is effectively decided by most analysts. Or maybe it doesn't even get to me in time and my vote doesn't count.
Oregon I'd trust to open and count it accordingly as it checks all the boxes to be legit. But maybe another state is not set up for this process and hacks it together the month before the election. Maybe in that state my ballot doesn't make it to NC on time or even until after the election. Maybe once the ballot makes it home, it sits another 2 weeks in a backlog as a poorly funded, overworked team tries to catch up and confirm/reconcile votes across in person and this new mail in system. Maybe byt the time my ballot is done, it's the second week of December and the commission or Secretary of State isn't sure it has the right numbers and has to do a recount (or ignores it as clearly it's a broken system anyway, according to the president, so of course it would be off).
All of a sudden, we have another Constitutional crisis on our hands. The guy in charge has spread misinformation or full on fake news about an otherwise working system. He argued against and his party rejected any efforts to fund the mail in side of the national election even though it was openly attacked by foreign nations last time and is no more secure than then. Maybe GOP governors and secretaries of state who follow the president closely use his claims so that, due to expanded mail in voting, of course the numbers don't match polling or prior data so the election itself is a sham. Whether the numbers show Trump winning or losing, it's all a sham and can be ignored or taken before SCotUS which luckily has a few of your guys (Federalist Society picks) on the majority.
The dilemma is we need to oust any official who aims to undermine any government system or program, in words or actions, unless they are working on factually reported data and studies that indicate change is needed (which is almost always). The current administration has been lying to its citizens from day 1. Somehow that hasn't forced the resignation.
At this point UPS/Fedex should step in and offer free shipping for ballots. Voters can drop off in their stores or their delivery people/trucks can act as pick up spots too. If nothing else it might buy them some goodwill. Or conscience.
Possibly accelerated, but for several years they've been moving in the direction of assuming nobody will visit a post office unless they have no other option and have reduced hours to whatever they think they can get away with politically.
Ten years ago there were quite a few post offices open 24/7/365. Today the 24-hour locations are at best 18/7 and the more usual hours are better than traditional banker's but worse than retail M-F, limited on Saturday, and LOLGFY on Sunday. Which limits their revenue to whatever services they have a legal monopoly on, plus package services for businesses where the shipper wasn't going to the post office to mail things anyhow.
