Incredibly frustrating to get mail by USPS over the past couple months and even more frustrating to know this is an intentional kneecapping of the USPS by the administration in order "prove" government services are inefficient to privatize the USPS

Its not a point about government effectiveness or efficiency. They kneecapped the USPS when they forced prefunding of pension liabilities (https://www.cnbc.com/2011/10/24/the-truth-about-the-post-off...).

They had more legislative leverage prior to 2018, so they could have done all this much earlier.

It is not possible to honestly discuss this in a meaningful way without acknowledging it's 3 months out from a presidential election. It the closest thing they can legally do to suppress voting turnout, and it's a deliberate strategy to win the election by reducing the franchise.

This isn't in a vacuum either, it's a coordinated part of a national legislative strategy (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/04/exposin...). It is coordinated across at the state and federal levels, and across branches. You can see here with the intentional degrading of the USPS immediately prior to a national election, at a state level with polling place closures (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-locations/so...) and photo id laws (https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...), and constellation of Republican judicial appointments coordinated with specially prepared and crafted legal challenges by Republican AGs and private parties at state and circuit levels.

This is how it's being done: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/...

Retirement benefits should be funded as they are accrued. That is not the problem. The problem is the USPS doesn’t have the power to price their products appropriately in order to pay for their expenses (including payroll which includes retirement benefits).

If anything, all entities promising retirement benefits should be forced to do it the way USPS does. In fact, non government entities were forced to via the Pension Protection Act of 2006, which is why non government employers stopped offering defined benefit pensions and other post employment benefits (OPEB) as they are simply not affordable.

Too bad it didn’t apply to governments, because if it did, then my kids and I wouldn’t be stuck paying for labor performed 30+ years ago because all the city and state governments decided they can just promise to pay people with future taxpayers’ money by underfunding defined benefit pension plans and retiree healthcare benefits.

I wish I hadn't mentioned the pension, because it takes away from the immediate and much worse problem that the governing party is trying to stay in power by preventing members of the other party from voting.

How are dems more likely to vote by mail? And what are the percentages for each party?

Short answer is the effect should be even overall, but what matters happens at state and district levels, so you could even disenfranchise more people of your own party on the net and still end up with an improved electoral outcome.

You could steal the vote from 500k Republicans in just Alabama and 150k Democrats spread across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania and have a net swing of 0 EC votes lost and 50 EC votes gained for Republicans.

You just have to create policies (like closing polling place, making vote by mail difficult, create voter id rules that exclude college students) that have small partisan differentials in a few swing states, which is why the greatest effort and impact is in urban centers in the midwest (followed by Latinx populations in the southwest like AZ and NM, and African American populations in the southeast like FL and GA).

Most large urban areas are Democratic. In the time of COVID, would you rather vote by mail or wait in line at overcrowded voting locations?

Dems are more likely to be affected by polling station closures and consolidation, so that e.g. all of Detroit has to vote in a single location.

They are not. Republican leadership is convinced they are but consider this quote from https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/510040-gop-fears-trump... :

> The R Street Institute, a think tank dedicated to free markets and limited government, recently released a study titled “Why conservatives should embrace sensible measures to expand absentee balloting.”

> The study cast doubt on claims that Democrats benefit from expanded mail-in voting, pointing to three states Trump carried in 2016 — Utah, Arizona and Montana — where about 70 percent of voters cast ballots through the mail.

GOP leadership is just totally unhinged.

If voting is effectively curtailed, everything else is moot. This election is a referendum on (American) democracy.

If voting is effectively curtailed, can it really be called a referendum?

Hmm. Wasn't that referendum settled in 2016 ? Trump is 30 years in the making.

Unless there's a swing back to restoring democratic norms there's no reasons the coming years are going to be much different, no matter who is elected president.

No, this is different. Trump at that time was a "why the fuck not" to people who hated the current climate and wanted "change". He was an "unknown" as far as the governance he would provide.

If Biden is able to take office I expect work to be done to try to salvage things.

> "Trump at that time was a 'why the fuck not' to people who hated the current climate and wanted 'change'."

Absolutely nothing prevents that from happening again. The economic, social, and political forces that disadvantaged large swathes of the public, riling them up enough to make them take a chance on Trump, are all still there. If anything, the fact that the COVID-19 recession is likely going to hit full force during the next administration and make their situation even worse makes voting for demagogues even _more_ likely. Biden isn't going to be able to wave a magic wand to fix the world even if he wins, which is not a given.

We're in for a bumpy ride.

Democrats like to play nice ("by the rules"), Republicans (and Trump in particular) do not.

As a consequence, it'll take a lot more than one term to undo everything that Trump has done in one term, and the way things were before Trump wasn't really peachy either.

One Trump term is going to require at least a decade to undo, and that's if it remains at just one term. Now add climate change on top of that and the future looks pretty grim.

I think you are vastly underestimating the difficulty in automating this. This has been proposed for decades and there is published academic research about the extraordinary difficulty of ensuring the integrity of the voters and the tallies. You can look at literature on the challenges with REAL ID implementation or Healthcare.gov for similar and smaller projects.

Extremely relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2030/

How would a vote 4 years ago invalidate the very real and observable means of voter suppression we see today?

Because he had less votes and won, so im not sure what this alleged widespread voter suppression is supposed to accomplish.

I'm pretty sure the alleged widespread voter suppression is supposed to accomplish a second term for Donald Trump as well as picking up some seats in both the Senate and House for his party.

Do you really believe that someone winning in the previous election is a guarantee that they would not try to suppress the vote in the current or future elections? If not, what point were you trying to make by bringing up the results of the 2016 election?

You will need to find some evidence of voter fraud for mail in ballots. Many states have it as an option and it hasn't happened. The military regularly votes by mail and it hasn't happened.

It's funny you open your reply about "absurdly dramatic" then lay an equally absurd claim about vote-by-mail having a problem with fraud.

Your reply also conveniently ignores the historical pattern of voter suppression coming from the Republican party.

It seems in America, some constitutional rights are more protected than others.

But the military I think we can trust more than the Postal Service, every time we hear of a postal employee destroying or throwing away mail should be a significant enough reason that the agency is simply not ready to take this on. Maybe at the next election, maybe with a significantly more funding, transparency, and security, but not now. Mail in voting would be great, but not now. It’s far too dangerous.

Tell that to people that live in Colorado, Oregon, Washington, or (mostly) Utah. They've been voting by mail for years.

I'd worry a lot more about computerized election systems before voting by mail. I think people are too worried about individual votes/errors. 0.0x% of ballots being lost/not counted/etc. is a problem with any election system ("hanging chads", signatures not matching well, ...), not just voting by mail. The question should be how hard is it to pull off a large scale disruption/fraud without being detected.

Your own current president always votes by mail. If it’s fine for him why on Earth do you think that it’s not fine for everyone else?

The coronavirus has been recognized as an issue since before March. The only reason why there is not better safeguards in place for vote by mail is because the ruling party does not want it to happen.

The fact that you're not familiar with the ballot authentication and verification mechanisms used in mail-in voting suggests a starting point for your research.

Several states have had mail-in voting for years. It only became a political issue a few months ago, and only amongst one party.

Meanwhile, rigged voting machines that flip votes have been caught on camera countless times. Zero effort has been made to do anything about that.

> All it takes is one or a few bad actors to skew the results.

Most elections aren't close enough for the outcome to be swung by the kind of paper ballot fraud that a single person is capable of committing. Unlike electronic hacks, paper ballot fraud doesn't scale.

>> The problem is the USPS doesn’t have the power to price their products appropriately in order to pay for their expenses

Technically that shouldn't matter. It's a government service and if postage doesnt cover the cost the federal government should.

But I'd be happy to see first class mail stop subsidising other stuff.

Inflation adjusted first class postage rate, 1885-present.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_posta...

A lot of the other stuff subsidizes first class mail whose volume has dropped enormously. The USPS also still has to maintain post offices that have very low volumes.

Trying to ELI5 this to myself - USPS has to fund their pensions and is forced to keep money aside for it. They are unable to make price increases to account for all this extra money that they have to keep aside since they are a public service. Their competitors UPS, FedEx are not being held to the same standard, and so USPS is losing out? And this makes a convenient excuse to show USPS as a failed org?

Almost. Non government entities don't offer the kind of unaffordable benefits such as defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare anyway as they became more and more unaffordable.

The whole deferred compensation scheme known as defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare morphed into a way for politicians to push payroll expenses into the future so that they could get elected on "low tax" platforms. They can get away with this because the laws requiring saving for deferred compensation don't apply to government entities.

"Defined benefit" should be replaced with either "100% guaranteed returns" or "tax backed" in order to raise the red flags it should.

Not only that, but UPS and FedEx probably don’t offer pensions at all. USPS will never be able to compete, even if they raised their prices.

I am sure they both offer define contribution pensions like almost all companies do.

In the US, pensions means defined benefit pensions, which cost a great amount more than defined contribution pensions.

With a defined contribution plan, the employer is off the hook immediately after giving the employee the cash.

With defined benefit, the employer is on the hook for all adverse investment performance as well as broader economic turmoil decades into the future.

The same tactics (let's call a spade a spade) is used in my home country to legitimize the end of our political regime.

> If anything, all entities promising retirement benefits should be forced to do it the way USPS does

That would be nice but [insert financing excuse here] others cant do it too.

> Too bad it didn’t apply to governments, because if it did, then my kids and I wouldn’t be stuck paying for labor performed 30+ years ago because all the city and state governments decided they can just promise to pay people with future taxpayers’ money by underfunding defined benefit pension plans and retiree healthcare benefits.

Yes but forcing just USPS to do it was an attack on USPS because it has to compete with private companies. State and local run organizations have no such competition thus 'locally too big to fail'.

I've heard of some interesting talk about making a working USPS federal credit union/bank for a variety of services to the public that might prove lucrative and something that would potentially ease USPSs cash troubles. I'm not an expert into the economics about that and it might prove disruptive to a lot of businesses.

> That would be nice but [insert financing excuse here] others cant do it too.

I don’t know what this means.

>Yes but forcing just USPS to do it was an attack on USPS because it has to compete with private companies.

FedEx and UPS are subject to the same pension and retirement benefit funding requirements as USPS. It’s only government entities that aren’t regulated (because politicians like to be able to pay current employees with future taxpayer money and advertise they are keeping taxes low now so they get elected).

Not letting USPS set it’s prices is what might make it non competitive with UPS/Fedex.

>FedEx and UPS are subject to the same pension and retirement benefit funding requirements as USPS.

No they FedEx and UPS were required to prefund pensions in the 1970s, but they were given 40 years in which to do it.

USPS was given 10 years. In addition USPS was required to prefund retirement medical benefits, and unlike a private company who can cut retirement medical benefits at any time, USPS requires an act of congress to cut retirement medical benefits.

Furthermore, when calculating how much they need to set aside for retirement medical benefits, USPS can only use a much lower interest rate than private companies are allowed to use because they are forced to invest only in T-bills.

I agree the exact terms of funding requirements (10 years) for USPS were politically motivated to weaken it, but the philosophy of funding accrued benefits is sound, and it was long overdue. The same should be required of all entities issuing defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare.

Also, I find it ridiculous that retirement medical benefits can just be cut anytime, as they are part of the compensation agreement. It's just a fluke of the law that it was never enshrined like defined benefit pensions were.

I don't see where the USPS is required to use T-bill rates to value liabilities in the tex of the PAEA law:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/109/hr6407/text

>who shall hold membership in the American Academy of Actuaries and shall be qualified in the evaluation of pension obligations, to conduct a review in accordance with generally accepted actuarial practices and principles and to provide a report to the Commission containing the results of the review.

The philosophy being sound is worthless if the execution is flawed.

As to investing look at page 35-36. It’s not literally just T-bills, but treasury holdings with very low interest rates compared to the kinds of investments private companies are allowed to make.

https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/10k-reports/fy2...

Interesting, I would like to see the reasoning for why its all just treasury holdings. I don't see anything in the law that would mandate it.

It's another good idea in theory, but the implementation is being controlled and kneecapped by a party/administration that wants it dead, while throwing up their hands and saying "not our faults". A good idea with a bad implementation is in the end just another bad implementation, forget every word before "bad". Good intentions were claimed but they have no basis in fact. The GOP as a whole is corrupt to its core.

> I don’t know what this means.

That means expanding these requirements to other departments will need sigificant political backing and will be very unpopular. I do view benefit funding requirements as necessary.

> politicians like to be able to pay current employees with future taxpayer money and advertise they are keeping taxes low now so they get elected

looks like you agree with me on that.

> Not letting USPS set it’s prices is what might make it non competitive with UPS/Fedex.

That is an entirely different discussion that would garner my interest.

Banking from the post office is a pretty common thing and makes a lot of sense as it gives people a public, non-profit banking avenue for the poor and under served.

I would agree if there were more post offices, but the USPS has been closing them over the last twenty years to cut costs. They serve wide geographic areas and it is easier to find a local credit union than a post office these days. The poor would be better served with Internet banking.

Perhaps a potential USPS credit union would disrupt payday loans.

Many people do not have reliable internet access.

If they want to set prices themselves then let them, but remove their monopoly on letters. Repeal the private express statutes. That seems quite fair.

>> Retirement benefits should be funded as they are accrued. That is not the problem.

No, that really is the problem. Prefunding pension liabilities is something that literally no company or federal agency ever does, for obvious reasons.

I don’t know what this “prefunding” word means, but the USPS was only required to save for accrued benefits. Which every non governmental entity is required to do in the US due to ERISA and PPA 2006.

https://www.cnbc.com/2011/10/24/the-truth-about-the-post-off...

> Although accounting rules require the postal service to calculate future liabilities, including those for projected future employees, the law only requires pre-funding of obligations to actual current and past employees

The point is that on the day that the USPS hires a 20-year-old employee they immediately need to set aside money for this worker's healthcare at age 90, which is an astronomical sum (as projections of future healthcare costs are inevitably astronomical).

And no, no private entity in the US is required to prefund retiree health benefits.

Which goes to show how ridiculous it is to offer retiree healthcare benefits. If the cost is so high as to be described as astronomical, then why is the government offering it?

Let's say USPS has promised to pay for a 20-year-old employee's health care for the next 70 years. Let's say the total price of that health care is going to be $10M over the 70-year course.

What should they do that neither involves setting sufficient money aside today nor a significant chance of failing to fulfill their obligation?

Keep in mind that USPS' core business can't turn much of a profit due to Congressionally-defined price caps, so it is a very poor place to "invest" money.

Note, it looks like that final link is 404'ing.

The correct link appears to be:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/...

Thank you.

There is also controversy over the pick of USPS leader. It seems this appointment was mostly political.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/us/politics/postmaster-ge...

> It the closest thing they can legally do to suppress voting turnout, and it's a deliberate strategy to win the election by reducing the franchise.

I haven't followed any of this story and this is the first time I'm reading up on it, but why would this increase the chances of Trump winning? Wouldn't restricting mail-in voting affect both sides roughly equally? That's what I would expect, anyway, but perhaps I'm missing something?

your last link is 404; this is it https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/...

I agree that this was a kneecapping and completely disagree that we need to privatize the USPS. Current administration has gained the ability to raise the price for packages coming in from China[1] and it has tried to charge Amazon more using USPS by witholding a federal 10 billion loan[2]. There are many more instances that reliably indicate the USPS recieves consistent hostility from the federal government.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/25/postal-compromise-close-as-u...

[2] https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/trump-postal-service-cha...

It’s not about privatizing the service, it’s about disrupting their ability to process mail in ballots for the election.

If they wanted to privatize it, they could have don’t it at any time during the past four years.

> It’s not about privatizing the service,

Yes it is.

> it’s about disrupting their ability to process mail in ballots for the election.

True, but those are complementary not mutually exclsuive motivations.

> Yes it is.

I don't play along with excuses. As I said, if it was really about that, they had numerous opportunities in the past four years.

No, I'm saying that both causing the postal service to fail to politically justify full privatization and interfering with mail-in voting for perceived benefit in the immediate upcoming election are actual motivations of the policies being implemented by the executive branch that impede USPS function.

I don't think either of those motivations is okay, in fact, I think the action being taken on either basis alone would be, and a fortiori them being taken with both motivations is, a serious abuse of executive power.

I dont know, I support this action. I'd rather defund the USPS then the police force. Rebuilding the USPS using solid business fundamentals would be good for everyone.

He isn't saying it's okay.

It's a double prong attack on the USPS via saying they can't handle mail, let alone all the mail in ballots as well as an attempt to bankrupt them before the election to keep it in court for a while as well as give the Trump base an out and say "I told ya so"

Demand is way up due to the pandemic. Amazon hired 175,000 temporary workers to keep up with demand [1]. All the Trump adminstration had to do to cause a problem was not hire any extra help and disallow overtime.

[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amazon-reaches-1-million-w...

A business[1] getting in to financial trouble because of massive increase in customers is indeed a curious affair.

[1]: Which the USPS is not, but let's be flexible with the term.

Is there a legitimate law on the books that Fedex et al cannot legally deliver letters, or is it just that subsidized postage stamps are so cheap no private company can profit off paper mail delivery?

Because letters are paper but so are magazines, newspapers, etc that I know are delivered by non-USPS mail carriers.

It isn't a very persuasive argument to destroy cheap post for the masses to... let investors make money. As it is if usps was incapable of fulfilling its duty private entities could enter the market at way higher prices and if useful would see business.

Fedex can (and do) deliver letters. They cannot deliver first class mail or use the mailbox, the interior of which is technically property of the US post office.

First class mail is a "monopoly" as someone downthread noted, but not the kind that anyone trying to make a profit would want. The post office cannot set prices on first class mail (that's done by Congress) and needs to deliver mail everywhere at the price Congress has mandated, even when it is done at a loss.

> Is there a legitimate law on the books that Fedex et al cannot legally deliver letters.

I just learned this, but yes, that appears to be the case! The private express statutes[1] appear to do just that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Express_Statutes

The USPS actually has two legally enforced monopolies, as per Title 39 of the US Code. One is over the delivery of anything defined as a “letter,” which is within certain size and weight limits. The second is over the use of your mailbox. That is correct: there are criminal violations if anyone puts anything in your mail box that is not US government approved “mail.”

It doesn’t really seem enforceable though since there is an explicit cutout in that for “urgent” letters. Every letter I send is urgent!

This sounds plausible, but wouldn't work. The USPS has a history of defending its monopoly. Two example:

In 1971 a private corporation, the Independent Postal System of America, offered to deliver Christmas cards for five cents each — three cents less than the U.S.P.S. rate. They were stopped by a court injunction.

In 1966 the CF&I Steel Corporation, frustrated by the quality of postal service between their Denver headquarters and their plant in Pueblo, hired an armored-car service to deliver the mail. After five months of operation the service was halted by the Denver Post Office, and "at the Post Office’s suggestion" CF&I paid two thousand dollars toward back postage..

Yes and no. It has a government granted monopoly on relatively inexpensive but relatively fast letter delivery. I can certainly send a letter overnight by FedEx if I want to but it will cost a lot more and FedEx can't leave the envelope in the mailbox almost everyone has.

I do tend to think the USPS should be allowed to increase their rates to sustainable levels. Individuals are not nearly as dependent on being able to regularly send letters across the country for well under a dollar as they once were.

The underlying motivation here is to accomplish two things:

1. Destroy the viability of the post office as a business (a long running campaign)

2. Disenfranchise voters (a relatively recent campaign)

Tens of thousands of people were disenfranchised during the primaries because their ballots were received too late, even if they were postmarked on time. [1]

Tax returns are considered to be submitted on the date of their postmark, but ballots are not. There seems to be an important disconnect here tied to the different incentives for the state.

Dropping ballots off at dropbox makes a lot of sense, but it won't work for everyone. The rules also vary and availability is often poorly communicated. Plus, most people won't expect to have a problem with their ballot being counted until they find out that it wasn't counted.

But the problem doesn't start with submitting your ballot. First you have to successfully register to vote-by-mail (some states require a form to be mailed in), and most importantly you have to actually receive your ballot in time. This also happened during the primaries, and so people had to go vote in person after all (or be disenfranchised). [2]

Lots of things we take for granted will stop working with a failed postal service, but voting is particularly key right now. It is the only path towards attempting to fix the issue at hand.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/07/13/889751095/signed-sealed-undel...

[2] https://time.com/5874571/new-york-state-general-election/

The USPS is, by definition within the US Constitution, not a business. It is an agency of the federal government. It has no intrinsic responsibility to be profitable, or even self-funding, any more so than the Department of Transportation or the Census Bureau or the military.

All arguments and restrictions along those lines serve only the private businesses that would benefit from its de facto dissolution.

Per the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Reorganization_Act

> The United States Postal Service shall be operated as a basic and fundamental service provided to the people by the Government of the United States, authorized by the Constitution, created by Act of Congress, and supported by the people. The Postal Service shall have as its basic function the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities. The costs of establishing and maintaining the Postal Service shall not be apportioned to impair the overall value of such service to the people.

> 2. Disenfranchise voters (a relatively recent campaign)

Recent as in it started the instant the 15th amendment was passed.

I'm referring to disenfranchisement by way of disrupting the operation of the mail, which I don't think has been a major focus for quite that long.

Jim Crow laws were much more effective means of disenfranchisement during Reconstruction.

Jim Crow laws were after Reconstruction.

This is problematic to voting in the same way closing polling sites is, framed as cost cutting or inefficiency reduction with the intention of reducing access to a subset of the population.

This is just frustration, but the fact that we could pass a massive defense bill (again, I know), but are unable to fund basic services shows the integrity of our government. Moreover, it shows the culpability of most of the elected officials, from both parties.

We don’t need a labor movement, we need a people’s movement.

> Moreover, it shows the culpability of most of the elected officials, from both parties.

It shows that after the labor movement was destroyed, the only material base for the Democratic Party was to go looking for money from the same people who give it to Republicans.

Saying we don’t need a labor movement is equivalent to saying “we don’t need a political party that relies on support from workers.”

If I may, I'll add a correction to your quoted statement to give my intended meaning: “we don’t need a political party that relies only on support from workers.”

The subdivision and segregation of American political movements has been an incredibly useful tool in defusing them. The labor, civil rights, suffrage, identity movements, were powerful, but the lack of intersectionality made it so that once policy victories were achieved the tenor died down. My comment was focused on how this was a fundamental weakness.

For example, is voting by mail a "labor" issue? I would say no, and even if this opinion is generally wrong it shows the subdivision that occurs. There is no modern suffrage movement in the same way as existed in the early part of the 1900s. The idea of a "people's movement" is to say we need a political party that relies on the people, not kleptocrats, not lawyers, not donors, and fights for issues that are relevant to those people.

I didn't march in the recent protests because I am black, because I've felt fear from the police, because I've been systemically oppressed. Most of my peers didn't either, and the ones who were subject to those oppressions, among many others, are far braver than me, and for that I feel empathy. And for that we should march. These are issues of "people" because that's the most common denominator, not because we're excluding the factors.

The underlying thread of what I said is that we need a movement that relies on the common empathy we have for each other. I want community. I want justice. I want to love my neighbor, as myself. I want you to pray to your god while I mine, even if mine is just a nice bike ride on a Sunday morning.

And I know cynics, rightfully jaded by their lives, will probably say I'm being hopeful, youthful, naive. And I accept all of these, but I'd rather be those than have what we have today, what a simple cross to carry.

I guess I just want to listen to John Lenin's Imagine and feel like he's talking about my world. And I'm not the only one.

I won’t say that you’re naive, but only that that is kind of diffuse liberalism has no history of effecting real political change while the labor movement has a long, international history of doing so.

While it’s good to acknowledge the failings of prior forms of the labor movement in addressing issues of race and gender, this doesn’t reflect their current state or reality. Unions for groups like the teachers, nurses, or service workers across the country are already wildly diverse across every axis.

The primary failing of solidarity in the US is among white collar professionals, who see the struggle of these workers as separate from their own concerns, even though these unions been fighting for the racial and economic justice for many years prior to the current unrest. To my mind, this is the result of an ingrained classism, where said white collar workers see themselves above unionization (and thus the working class union members), preferring acts of temporary, performative symbolism over durable structures that would unite them with others across class lines. The first step in fighting this would of course be to form their own unions in explicit solidarity with those of the working class.

No. The Democrats need to be a political party that relies on support from regular people. Whether they are workers is beside the point.

Now, the unions were a good way of funneling support to the Democrats. (Which, by the way, was a bit unfair if you were a Republican and a union member, but that's not the point.) What's missing now for the Democrats isn't the workers, it's the mechanism for mobilizing bulk support.

The federal government is deploying Border Patrol and DHS agents to democratic American cities to use less-lethal ammunition on people demanding the defunding of police to better fund community services.

The people's movement is happening right now.

I don't like to leave political comments here, but this gets my goad:

> it shows the culpability of most of the elected officials, from both parties.

The "both parties" remark drives me crazy, as if they are equally culpable in how we got to today, or equally culpable in their current leadership of America, so let's just back up for a moment.

No Democratic president has won a majority of the white vote since 1964. The Republican Southern Strategy cynically used racism to dismantle the New Deal. Mondale was the last New Deal democrat. His crushing defeat by Reagan is what led to the the current Democratic party. See the Democratic Leadership Council. The Democrats had lost the white vote to racists and they had to do something to start winning elections. So they adopted the so-called Third Way.

Simultaneously, Republicans and "right-to-work" (hah) laws dismantled unions, the primary source of Democratic fund raising. The Democrats had to go somewhere for money and that somewhere was corporate donors.

So we end up with both parties beholden to corporate influence and neither party truly representing working class voters. But let us not forget that the Democrats didn't have a whole lot of options. Republicans also loosened campaign finance restrictions making it even more expensive to win elections. Heads we win, tails you lose.

So the Republicans hold on to white working class voters through racism, not because they represent their economic interests. The Democrats become the "everyone else" party but are too much in the pocket of corporations and wall street. (One of Obama's biggest mistakes was not locking up the crooks responsible for the sub-prime crisis.)

Still, the Democrats are much more the party of the working class voter than Republicans. You don't see any Republican candidate arguing for sectoral collective bargaining for example. Republicans, not Democrats, are trying to kill the USPS, the largest provider of decent working-class jobs in the country.

I hope that Trump is the end of the Southern Strategy and that we end up with a not-racist Republican party. The Democrats need an opposition party that's based on serious policy differences instead of a party based on racism and cynicism.

For example, I don't think there's a free-market answer solution to health insurance, but if the Republicans believe that, let them at least make a serious proposal.

Here's an example of where the Republican party might go:

Five years ago, Oren Cass sat at the center of the Republican Party. Cass is a former management consultant who served as the domestic policy director for the Mitt Romney campaign and then as a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. But then he launched an insurgency.

Today, Cass is the founder and executive director of American Compass, a new think tank created to challenge the right-wing economic orthodoxy. Cass thinks conservatism has lost its way, becoming obsessed with low tax rates and a quasi-religious veneration of markets. What conservatives need, he thinks, are clear social goals that can structure a radically new economic agenda: a vision that puts families first, eschews economic growth as the be-all-end-all of policymaking, and recognizes the inescapability of government intervention in the economy. Trump is likely — though not certain — to lose in 2020. And then, Cass thinks, Republicans will face a choice: to return to a “pre-Trump” consensus, or to build a “post-Trump future” — one that, he hopes, will prevent more Trump-like politicians from rising.

In this conversation, Cass and I discuss how current economic indicators fail, the relationship between economics and culture, why Cass believes production — not consumption — should be the central focus of public policy, the problems with how our society assigns status to different professions, the role that power plays in determining market outcomes, the conservative case against market fundamentalism, why Cass supports labor unions and industrial policy but not a job guarantee or publicly funded childcare, what the future of the Republican Party after Donald Trump looks like, whether Cass’s policies are big enough to solve the problems he identifies, and more.

https://overcast.fm/+QLhWcHCkY

Now that's a serious policy difference we can discuss instead of the clown show that is the current Republican party.

I have a lot of beefs with the Democratic party but it's not "both parties" by any stretch of the imagination.

> And then, Cass thinks, Republicans will face a choice: to return to a “pre-Trump” consensus, or to build a “post-Trump future” — one that, he hopes, will prevent more Trump-like politicians from rising.

There's also a third option: double down on Trumpism / Tea Party politics and voter suppression/manipulation. Even with the current crisis and Trump being essentially a proto-fascist, he has a 41% approval rating. More than many Western conservative or outright alt-right/fascist parties enjoy.

Indeed; Trump isn't some sort of accidental quirk that got in to office by some weird accident, it's the continuation and escalation of a pattern that has been going on for decades.

If Trump will lose in November that won't be the end if it, it might be the start of of a healing process and it's encouraging to see people like Cass are actively working on this, but I fear Trump won't be the last of his kind getting elected to office.

I hope to hell I'm wrong. It's important to not be defeatist about this, but it's even more important to not declare victory after President Biden gets elected.

The reason I felt a need to add it is that it differs from the common bad-side/good-side dichotomy, there is nuance in terms of degrees of culpability but the statement is true irrespective

> I've waited in line to vote, but the lines were never longer than the lines at my local supermarket on Saturday morning.

You've been very lucky then.

For Obama's first term election, the lines at my polling place were across the room, out the door, down the hallway, out the building door, and a good distance down the block (i.e., easily a few hundred or more waiting in line to get their chance to cast their vote). And it was like this starting from before the polls opened until they closed.

Many would have loved to see lines "never longer than the lines at my local supermarket on Saturday morning" for that election at that polling place.

No. In my case, the local supermarket's lines are terrible. You're a lucky one. In my neighborhood, people wait 30-45 minutes to get in the supermarket EVERY week. Most are moving to systems like Instacart when they can afford it.

> I've waited in line to vote, but the lines were never longer than the lines at my local supermarket on Saturday morning

As is disproportionately the case on HN, you are probably a relatively privileged individual, living in a relatively privileged community. Even if not, you should be aware that generalizing from your personal experience is not reliable.

I voted by mail in Seattle for years and never had an issue or even heard of one. The ballot goes in a tamper-evident envelope, sealed within the mailing envelope. You also get online tracking to know your ballot was received and processed.

You're welcome.

Me and my peeps did the yeoman work to both protect the secret ballot and ensure end-to-end auditability.

If every jurisdiction nationwide adopted the rules, procedures, and operations used by King County Elections, we'd be in good shape.

But they won't.

Why not? I am curious to know more - is it expensive or difficult to implement? Couldn’t other jurisdictions copy King County’s system?

Election administration is chronically underfunded.

A lot of people have some very funny ideas about how to conduct elections.

For examples:

Should ballots be required to be received or postmarked by Election Day to be accepted? (Correct answer is postmarked.)

If a voter makes a mistake, how does it get corrected? Some jurisdictions just toss any ballot with any mistake.

What are the standards for signature verification? What happens if the admins identify a mismatch?

Sadly, the minutia goes on and on.

It'd be more helpful if you provided specifics. Also, conflating postal balloting and COVID-19 is inappropriate.

In principle, you should advocate for the Australian Ballot, which is private voting and public counting.

The election integrity gold standard is casting ballots at poll sites which are tabulated onsite the moment the polls close and the results shared immediately.

Some of the larger identified risks of postal balloting, generally, are mass disenfranchisement, losing the secret ballot, ballots and votes lost to the process, making auditing much harder, and pre-tabulating votes (as ballots are received).

Specific precautions and safe guards are required to mitigate these risks. Even well intentioned election administrators often don't have the resources, skills, and experience to conduct large postal balloting (aka vote-by-mail).

Despite all the known risks, the benefit of enfranchising people who'd other wise not be able to vote is reason enough to support vote-by-mail.

In conclusion, at this time, the correct policy position at this time is to dramatically increase funding for election administration and deploy 1,000s of election observers.

Those two links do not imply what you think they imply. Those are problems with registrations, not ballots.

If you truly consider problems with the VRDBs a high priority, then advocate for nationwide automatic universal voter registration, like every other mature democracy has done, thereby eliminating the problem.

Further, I really do think you should compile an exhaustive list of all the problems and attack vectors you've found. Start by comparing and contrasting the procedures from misc jurisdictions. Observe some elections. Attend all the canvassing board meetings for an entire election cycle. Interview election administrators. Etc.

What you learn may surprise you.

Ya. I encourage you to learn how real world election administration is done.

Ballot stuffing just isn't possible with the procedures used in King County and thru out Washington State.

With poll sites, everyone had to sign in a poll book to receive a ballot.

With postal ballots, they use ballot tracking and reconciliation reports.

So. There are many valid election integrity criticisms. You haven't mentioned any of them yet.

This would be more credible if US in person voting didn’t often involve electronic voting machines with closed source software, no paper trail, and proven exploits.

That’s what mail in voting compares to.

I voted in the first election in the US to ever use the Dibold [1] [2] machines, in Atlanta Georgia.

It was obvious to anyone with a single honest neuron that there was no way to trust these machines.

I've never voted since. There is no point in pretending like the system has credibility or accountability.

[1] https://columbusfreepress.com/article/diebold-indicted-its-s...

[2] https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/05/27/touchscreen-voting-makes-e...

Edit: Toned it down a bit. How many downvoting cowards do we have out there? Respond or GTFO.

I didn't downvote you, but I suspect that some people reacted negatively to your strategy of "don't vote, then the people with power will feel so embarrassed at the lack of credibility of the system that they will work to regain people's trust".

Also, if the comment above is your "toned down" wording, I'm glad I didn't read the original version, or I probably would have downvoted you.

Who are you quoting there? Putting a few too many words in my mouth.

To many of us, the system has lost all cedibility, and voting is signalling just the opposite of that. Nothing about embarrassing anyone. No way to regain people trust at this point. We're too far gone.

Sorry, that wasn't intended to be a quote, I was trying to understand what you thought refusing to vote would achieve.

Are you hoping that your non-participation in voting is "signalling" the lack of credibility in the system, and that public awareness of this will contribute to some eventual improved outcome for society, or are you just trying to avoid misleading(?) people into believing the supposed false notion that voting can lead to positive changes in government policy?

I'm not offering solutions, just observations.

The system is broken and one of the indications of this is all the people that belive that voting can actually make a change for the better, as opposed to just swapping out puppets with no change of puppet-masters.

Do you believe that the people and parties who win elections don't have any effect on the policies of governments? Does this apply to every country, or do some countries avoid being controlled by puppet-masters?

I suppose it's possible that all the policy changes we've seen in governments around the world over the past decades have been due to changing whims of secretive puppet-masters which happen to coincide with the platforms of the candidates who ended up winning the elections, but I don't think that's the simplest explanation for the patterns observed.

I've also not voted once, in a local referendum in my country because I felt the entire thing was instigated under a fraudulent pretext just to stir up shit and had no legitimacy. I get where you're coming from.

But ... have you noticed who is in office? The stakes are too high to make these sort of principled stands right now. Hell, I'm not even talking about the politics of it: four more years of Trump will mean four more years of a deeply toxic person in office bringing the entire level of discourse of the entire country down. Literally everyone of every political affiliation will be hurt by this, except perhaps die-hard anarchists who would prefer to see the entire society collapse (and Trump is certainly a step in that direction).

Voting and going to the grocery store are pretty different in multiple ways.

For one thing, we give people exactly one day for in-person voting, and they don't get the day off from work - so they probably have a total of maybe 5 non-work hours available to them during which polling places are open, they go to one, stand in line with thousands of other people, then walk into a crowded place, interact up close with polling staff, and then interact up close with polling equipment. The polling equipment is not frequently sterilized (if at all), the polling staff might not have protective gear, and the polling places are cramped and poorly ventilated. It doesn't matter how many people need to vote there - 100k? 1k? same difference - you've all got to do it today, and in these specific hours.

Sounds really safe!

In comparison, you can go to the grocery store whenever is best for you (as long as they're open - and many are open 24 hours any day of the week), there are lots of locations to choose from, and if you go during off-peak hours the aisles are relatively empty and you have enough space to social distance from the other people in the store. At this point, the staff typically have masks+gloves and there's often hand sanitizer and cough shields. Some grocery stores explicitly limit the # of people inside at any given time.

Is early voting an option every where? I know there's been a push in my local area informing people that it is an option to avoid the rush on election day.

Early voting is an option in many places, but it's typically very limited. In some states it has been curtailed as a vote suppression measure specifically because so many people use it.

"The voting procedures of the past" is accurate, but only in that i described the most recent election, within the last year. It's silly to assume everything will be fixed by november with how little we invest into our elections.

Among other reasons, this is in big part happening due to a large push toward mail-in voting come the next Presidential election. It seems that certain political entities think they will suffer at the poles due to the fact that it’ll be easier to vote.

easier voting -> more votes -> undesirable outcomes

Republicans. It is Republicans who think more people voting means they will lose.

Now is a time to be absolutely frank and direct with our words and our actions. Our democracy is not invincible. It is not inevitable. It is teetering on the brink and if it falls, there is absolutely no guarantee that it will recover.

There is exactly one party who is trying to undermine the most basic principle of our democracy, and that is the Republican Party.

Every fallen democracy had an election that was unexpectedly their last.

Vote, donate, discuss accordingly.

Edited to remove the 3 words, “because it’s true,” that projected from past elections into this election.

You’re right that the Republicans may very well be hurting themselves by disrupting Americans’ right to vote. They might be hurting themselves. They are definitely hurting our democracy.

Then why are republicans fighting so hard to keep people who should legally be allowed to vote from voting? They can’t be doing it because they think it will hurt their chances.

Being able to produce a counterargument does not qualify the original argument as "parroting talking points".

> NYTimes disagrees with you that higher turnout always helps the Democrats.

Well maybe Trump doesn't read the NYTimes:

"Trump says Republicans would ‘never’ be elected again if it was easier to vote"

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/30/trump-republ...

I am no fan of the Democratic Party and strongly feel we need to overhaul our systems in a big, big way. Part of that overhaul cannot be, however, a period without democracy. It is much easier to maintain, modify, or destroy a democracy than it is to create one.

Here you have the Republican establishment, not insurgents, actively trying to disrupt Americans’ right to vote for their leadership.

This is presuming you have democracy now, when studies that show that congressional policy has no correlation to the interests of the people at large but a meaningful correlation to lobbyist money.

In a republic, representatives are meant to be selected as being a stand in for the majority of their electorates will and interests. In aggregate, such authentic representatives would then be proposing policy and instituting an agenda corresponding to the desires of a majority of the public at large.

Studies show a supermajority support in the US now for drug war deescalation, universal health care, military disarmament and an end to the Middle Eastern occupations, more equitable tax code, and more. Policies a substantial minority in congress are even remotely interested in considering let alone passing.

Its not much of a democracy if the people you elect, in aggregate, are not actually acting in the interests of their electorate. At all. Its a democracy in name, but a plutocracy in practice, and to be fair this was the structural intent of the founding documents. Having a senate is undemocratic. Having an electoral college is undemocratic. First past the post voting is undemocratic. Historically, huge restrictions on suffrage, the barriers put in place for newly suffraged peoples to actually vote, general disenfranchisement / difficulties in voting, the lack of regulation on campaigning, etc are in place to perpetuate and empower the plutocratic power duopoly regime incumbent political institutions exist to protect.

But thats where conservative mindsets come from in the first place. Content with the status quo and in fear of things going wrong that they don't want to try to do right. And its not an unfounded fear - centuries of evidence shows regime change never works, especially when its against the interests of a societies incumbent ruling class. But I just don't like maintaining the veneer delusion that America is anything close to truly democratic, or has ever really been.

> Democratic administrations, even with majorities to pass legislation, have done nothing to correct much of the anti-democratic processes in the US including elections being on a non-holiday Tuesday, absentee ballots being limited / restricted and operating state-by-state, the persistence of first past the post voting being the least representative form of election, the continued existence of the electoral college and senate, nothing to correct the loss of voting rights for felons, and more.

How many of those issues could the Democrats have fixed without passing a constitutional amendment? Such a change requires more than a Democratic administration with a legislative majority.

Just from the list in my post:

> elections being on a non-holiday Tuesday

Simple majority legislation

> absentee ballots being limited / restricted and operating state-by-state

Really easy to correct with conditional budget funding on the basis of providing / enabling absentee / mail in voting, again a simple legislative majority on a budget bill

> the persistence of first past the post voting being the least representative form of election

First past the post isn't codified into the constitution. The only part that requires constitutional amendment is the electoral college but that can already be overriden with a combination of popular vote interstate compact and said statewide elections being held in an approval or score voting way.

This one requires policy change that is federal law currently mandating first past the post, but its not constitutional. Additionally this could be done in a way that removes federal simple majority requirements in federal elections and instead uses federal funding incentives to pressure states to adopt more democratic election systems because that would face a lot less blowback from anti-democracy interests.

> the continued existence of the electoral college and senate

This is the one that absolutely requires amendment. The electoral college can largely be made obsolete with the interstate compact but little can be done about how undemocratic the senate is. That is wholly intentional though - the senate was introduced to give less populated states more influence in government and to largely provide capital a numerically small wing of congress to control more easily monetarily.

> nothing to correct the loss of voting rights for felons

Felony voting rights are currently state by state, and again federal law or financial incentives could be used to pressure states to not deprive felons of their voting rights, or it could be codified as law with simple majority.

So of my stated points 4/5 can be done with just regular law, much of it done with just budgetary law requirements.

The craziest thing about the whole situations is there actually isn’t much evidence that vote by mail favors republicans; and yet they’re willing to degrade postal service to a country more reliant on it than ever, just for a small hope of electoral advantage.

Edit: article in case anyone isn’t convinced (I was skeptical at first, given the tone of the discussion): https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/us/politics/vote-by-mail....

The concern for the GOP isn’t that democrats favor voting by mail, it’s that the GOP has worked hard to make it as hard as possible to vote in person in targeted (eg non Republican) communities.

Widespread vote from mail defeats that as it means that their selective polling closures, and arbitrary barriers to voting in person, go away

This is a great point. That makes a lot of sense.

Out of curiosity, what are those barriers?

The simplest one is just selectively closing polling places, or the related practice of requiring local jurisdictions to fund their own elections, which selectively impacts poorer cities or counties. Next comes voter identification laws which selectively target people who are less likely to have government identification cards (black voters are four times more likely to lack both a drivers license and a US passport compared to white voters). Finally you simply throw ballots from the disfavored precincts directly in the trash. County officials can do this in several ways, by not delivering working machines or official ballots to certain precincts, by forcing precincts to vote on provisional ballots that officials have the authority to ignore, and by subjectively discarding mailed ballots because the signature "doesn't match" according to a non-reproducible process.

Photo ID laws is a big one.

Closing polling stations in minority communities.

How about this: if Republicans were pushing voter ID laws plus a comprehensive plan to get IDs to every American who wishes to vote, I suspect no one would have any problem with such a proposal.

As it stands now, there are large groups of Americans for whom getting a photo ID is a non-trivial task. People without birth records, people who can’t take time off work to go to the DMV, people who don’t know that they go to the DMV to get an ID, people who live hours from the nearest DMV, so on and so forth.

Let’s make sure they all get a chance to vote. Any proposal that aims to do that, I believe, would not have the support of the Republican Party, because the Republican Party is uninterested in increasing voter turnout.

> Finally you simply throw ballots from the disfavored precincts directly in the trash.

cant this be done, arguably even easier with mail-in voting?

Provisional ballots avail a lot more leeway for election officials to legally discard ballots compared to mail-in ballots. Its not legally easier to do so with mail-in ballots

I don't think the person you were responsing to was suggesting mail in ballots are legally easier to disgard but easier to illegally discard.

I was making the distinction explicit. Illegally discarding ballots is...dicey - all it takes would be a journalist submitting a FOI request to the USPS and comparing the tally against counted votes

yes, thank you, exactly what i meant

Just to be clear I am in favor of providing free IDs and allowing the use of said ID, a driver's license, passport, etc for voting.

You say that no one would have an issue with such a proposal but then list the argument I have heard from multiple people of why this won't work.

How is someone supposed to get an id without going to the DMV or some other government office? The government doesn't have a picture of everyone so people would be required to go into an office to get one. Some people are unable to go in due to the reasons you list.

In the US why is identity linked to driving - why does the DMV do it? What do people who can’t drive due for proof of identity?

Australia and (most of) the UK:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_Identification_laws#Exam...

The USPS takes an image of the front of the envelope for every first class letter sent in the USA. It's a safe bet that they're doing OCR of the recipient/sender addresses and store it in a database. USPS Informed Delivery is just a customer-facing result of that long standing program.

The USPS includes legal protections against your mail being opened, and a mandate to serve everyone. Whereas private companies can be fully employed for government surveillance (third party doctrine), sell bulk records to commercial surveillance companies (equifax, google, etc), as well as refusing service to whomever they like (ala MC/Visa).

I agree this isn't the overriding concern of those trying to destroy the USPS, but it's surely a nice bonus.

Yes, the goal of surveillance is already being advanced in many ways under the existing structure of the USPS.

There was this incident a while back. Some psychopath sent letters threatening to kidnap young females, rape them, and kill them. He talked about how he had rigged out a van to facilitate this.

His letters got turned over to the FBI, since they would up in different states. Turns out that each stamp has microprinting on it that identifies it. Given the stamp, they were able to identify which post office it was sold at. They guessed at approximately when it was sold, and then from the security cameras they identified the letter writer.

So... explain how private entities are going to do more surveillance?

Private entities will just have terms of service which say they're entitled to open and inspect your mail for any reason they see fit. mindslight's comment above does a good job of touching on some other ways it will enable more surveillance.

But yes, the postal service has already been turned to this purpose in many ways and the days of "gentlemen don't read each other's mail" are largely over.

its really bizarre that we allow this while in other countries you get fines for not voting

There's actually only a small minority of countries where voting is a duty, not a right. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_voting. Still, it's interesting to think about how that would change the dynamics in the US. I think there is a lot to be said for making voting compulsory.

What if everybody got $20 for voting? It would be mostly equivalent to a $20 fine for not voting, but different psychologically.

Fascist strategies plain and simple. This is corruption folks. This is how seemingly functioning democracies slip into tyranny. Greed, lust for power, hatred.

Real fascist government, like Russian, would DREAM to have a vote by mail procedure, because it would make frauding the vote extremely easy.

The only thing stopping them is a complete wreck known as Russian Post.

This is a critical threat to democracy given the circumstances of the upcoming election.

So get the word out that mail in ballots can be dropped off in person ahead of time.

This is likely the sensible thing to do within a few weeks of the election anyway.

Even without the problems at the post office, dropping it off directly really reduces the chances of it getting lost.

Or stolen or discarded. To vote by mail is to trust the letter carriers, a union that has typically heavily favored one party over the other. The solution is to open more voting locations - which is a state responsibility, not to trust it to some third party.

That makes no sense. The people at the usps are federal employees (aka not a third party) and know the ramifications for tampering with the mail. I trust them to handle people’s votes over a volunteer everyday of the week. Opening more voting locations is a state responsibility, but when one party has a history of shirking their responsibilities and disenfranchising minorities then states ran by that party are hard to trust.

Yes. And the harder problem (if this weren’t hard enough) is getting the ballots delivered to voters in the first place.

That's a feature, not a bug. For those currently in charge at least.

Whatever USPS’s long term issues may be, is the middle of a pandemic the right time to “resolve” it?

Is depriving people of medicines and mail and making them wait weeks so they receive urgent communications and packages the right solution right now?

Wouldn’t it make far more sense to put in the short term Money during an emergency and try and figure out the long term solution afterwards?

Unless, of course, your goal Is a Hail Mary to cause chaos and confusion so you might win an otherwise increasingly unwinnable Election.

Table stakes for a civil society:

Clean water, fighting fires, drivable roads, edible food, reliable electricity, safety net for the poor elderly and infirm...

And delivering the mail.

And running the elections.

How did we get to this point in history where any of this is up for discussion?

Just as we start to receive vote by mail forms (at least here in California).

You can return your mail-in ballot to a drop slot / drop box at your local election office, which saves them postage fees and gives you more certainty it arrived. If you can’t spare the time then the mail still works, but for those that are worried, it’s allowed.

The location of the drop box for my precinct wasn't included in the state's list, but it ended up being a slot at one of the service windows at the city clerks office. Quick and easy.

I can't vote, but i can drive. Is it legal to drop someone else's ballot to the local election office? I'll drop it for people who can't go.

That’s derisively known as ballot harvesting and the legality varies. Republicans generally say it’s cheating and try to pass laws to ban it, except when they do it themselves. https://twitter.com/libsinamerica/status/1261069338427211782...

Varies per state.

Or toss it?

It’s terrible. It’s due to Coronavirus. People are calling in and not going to work at the processing centers, which are mainly in urban areas. Trucks aren’t taking the mail to or from post offices. Carriers are understaffed.

There definitely is overtime going on, I’m not sure where the article gets that confused. You can have all the hours you want if you work for the post office right now.

We went party invitations to my mom brother who lives downstate four weeks ago. We just got it back the other day, he never received it. My mother still pays her bills with a check and she got an overdue notice from the power company. When she called a few days later they finally got the payment and applied it to her bill.

I don’t know why you think overtime is continuing to be authorized when there are multiple reports of it being eliminated, including the release of the internal memo explicitly eliminating extra and late delivery trips, and directing staff to leave undelivered mail on the floor.

https://federalnewsnetwork.com/management/2020/07/usps-warns...

Father in law is a carrier and still working overtime

Fair enough

You need to check out who is in charge of usps..

You mean the trump appointed anti-usps sycophant? That is significantly invested in private usps competitors right?

:-/

Not sure why this comment is downvoted, seems pretty accurate https://www.salon.com/2020/05/07/top-trump-donor-who-gave-mo...

Because any suggestion that its the republicans behind political malfeasance on HN quickly gets down voted, you are only permitted to talk about "congress" or "the administration" in abstract.

Would have appreciated some transparency on this before a shipped a $1K ecommerce package by Priority Mail last week. I read the official notice on the website and it just said PM was gonna be extended by one day. Then after it arrived in the destination ZIP they bumped it out another day, and now it is showing Alert status with no scans. Really unprofessional.

Are they de-prioritizing all the spam and useless pre-sort stuff? That would be the first order of business for me.

I think it's the opposite, by design. This administration installed a loyalist (with extreme conflicts of interest) to de-legitimize the postal service prior to the election, which will largely be held by mail.

The injustices of the past should not be considered license for the future. We must call out corruption while we still have the freedom to do so.

The spam is what pays the bills so it will not get de-prioritized.

Maybe that's a sign of dysfunction. People like to rail against ad supported companies, why wouldn't we feel the same way here?

Because it's a small price to pay for being able to send mail across the country for 55 cents. If most of the funding for the USPS came from people buying stamps to send out birthday and christmas cards, they'd either have to jack up the price considerably, or they wouldn't stop by your house 6 days a week to see if you have anything to send.

Maybe if those wasteful practices cost what they should less people would do them. Christmas cards are about as impersonal as facebook happy birthday wishes. Daily mail pickup is another thing that is a total waste. I've probably put outgoing mail in my mailbox 50 times in the 20 years I've lived in this house. 99% of what I receive would be better served electronically, but shockingly some companies still don't offer paperless bills.

I think I’d be fine with a reduce role.

Also, you can make the same argument w.r.t to Facebook, google, ad networks, etc. you just pay for the ability to send email from gmail for free ️

I think it is more about it being new or ideologically convenient and the ad support is a convenient excuse. They don't rail against TV or radio and they are also ad supported.

The only mail I have received in the last two weeks is the usual Tuesday junk mail. There is routine mail I receive that is at least a week late so far.

I was in Guatemala and learned to my surprise that its national post has been disbanded. There's no functioning postal service of any kind, only private couriers.

How does that even work? By private couriers do you mean companies similar to UPS and FedEx? Or private couriers like the bike couriers in US cities? If I needed to mail documents to the other side of the country, for example, could I just drop it off at a storefront or would I have to hire one person to take the envelope the whole length of the journey?

Not even FedEx, you literally hire a guy to deliver an envelope say from Guatemala City to Xela.

The USPS has degraded into a spam delivery service at a great cost to the environment. Prices for mail need to go up drastically to discourage use for advertising.

If it's any consolation the spam you're talking about is considered "third class" mail and is delivered in lower priority than most other mail.

https://www.shipstation.com/blog/usps-first-class-mail-vs-pr...

Are there some actual studies stating that privatized mail office would be cheaper/more efficient/better service? Or is this just attempt at money grab?

I don't know of any study showing they are more efficient, but if they were, they would achive that efficiency by refusing to serve difficult markets. As part of their charter, USPS provides coverage to remote and rural areas that can't be easily served and that private services neglect.

Also, the USPS has had potentially businesss-killing policies legislated into their finances by a hostile Congress, like requring pensions to be pre-funded seventy-five years in advance over a ten-year period.

That's not to say the Post Office is as efficient as it could be. But the services it offers (e.g., bank substitute in impoverished neighborhoods for check cashing/money orders, not to mention significant employer) are vital to American small businesses and communities.

In the Netherlands the postal service was privatized over 20 years ago, but they're still beholden to various special laws which says they need to service everyone, need to deliver mail within a fixed timeframe, etc. Similar rules apply to the privatized railways, telephone system, health insurance, etc.

I don't really know if any of this was a good move or not – I'm too young to remember the pre-privatisation era – but overall it seems to work reasonably well; certainly not as dysfunctional as the USPS seems to be. Either way, my point is that privatisation doesn't need to lead to the USPS refusing to serve difficult markets.

I think the parsimonious explanation is that it's a political move to delegitimize voting by mail.

It's hard to imagine such intentionally bad management without some sort of motivation.

Modern usage of 'parsimony' has diverged significantly from that definition. Check out usages from the Cambridge corpus here:

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/parsimon...

I encounter it almost exclusively in the context of statistical and machine learning.

Voting by mail has proven exceptionally safe with extensive modern use, and greatly increases the safety of elections and democratic participation. All claims to the contrary are based in partisan politics and have no data to back them up. You are sorely wrong and pushing a purely political agenda.

Given equal technology, private services can only be cheaper if they exploit their workers harder, after all they have to make a profit so the difference has to come from somewhere. They could potentially offer better service by addressing certain niches that a broader service would be less suited to address, which partially explains UPS, FedEx, DHL etc.

Privatizing government services is a money grab nearly 100% of the time.