On Thursday, a niche trade organization called the National Association of Presort Mailers held the first of what is expected to be a regularly scheduled organization-wide teleconference. The call was to discuss a daunting task with which its members will be deeply involved: printing, packaging and mailing ballots for a general election in the midst of a pandemic.
The potential concept of mail-in voting expanding will just guarantee that Donnie and the Dotards will try very hard to starve the USPS to death as quickly as possible.
I keep wondering what these people think will replace the USPS.
IvankaMail, Inc.?
“All these procurement decisions, if they’re made in the next month, jurisdictions will be fine. But if they wait until August, it will be a disaster."
Bottom Line: Not a technical obstacle; just the need for political will.
(In others words, it’s solvable – like all of our problems.)
I don’t think there’s enough easy money to be had for any of the trump crime family members to be interested.
Maybe this is an area where congress needs to get involved to pass legislation that builds in contingencies for the unknown.
Companies also do not want to invest in equipment that they don’t need after the election unless they have some kind of incentive.
I’m sorry, but I must be missing something. I live in a mail-in election state and have seen and used the ballots referred to in this article many times for many different kinds of elections, both local and statewide. And I just don’t see how a reputable, mid- to large-sized printing company could not handle the job with relative ease. There’s nothing about the ballots, the envelopes, or anything else that appears to be that complicated that it couldn’t be done by this November, even if they didn’t start until late summer or early fall.
All our Republican office holders in Texas are trying to figure out how to make VBM even more draconian than it already is. I have refused in the past to do VBM in Texas because I know, as a Dem elections judge, that they use every trick they can to disqualify mail-in ballots. That is in addition to the ballots themselves being crazy and hard to understand.
The volume, and the reluctance to invest in equipment that may not be needed later. Printing is an extremely low margin business and on the verge of being completely destroyed by outsourcing to China.
There are incredible security issues for states that have always fought more voting access by the hoi-poloi. They won’t be able to get their ballots together in time for anything, because they can’t figure out how to cheat to stay in power.
Nothing.
They want it all privatized—despite the fact that the US Post Office is constitutionally mandated.
Bloomberg and Streyer should consider donating some of their billions to ensuring that vote-by-mail can be deployed in time for November. It’s unlikely that the necessary Congressional funding will get past McConnell’s Senate blockade and Trump’s presidential veto.
It really appears that this is exactly why Trump and the criminal cohort of Republicans want to suppress mail-in voting by destroying the Postal Service.
There are workarounds: remember, you don’t have to count all the ballots at once on election night. In fact I recall California 2018 congressional elections where they were still counting ballots past thanksgiving. You can leverage the parties’ GOTV operations to both deliver and “harvest” the ballots, with appropriate safeguards including jail time for election fraud.
The real problem is that in about a dozen states a legit vote-by-mail would flip control of the state government, and that ain’t permitted.
Trump Mail™. Spend $30,000 and you get to take a photo of yourself next to a cardboard cutout of a mail box.
Mr. President, or should I call you Mr. Corona or President Corona?
People are saying, and this is incredible, that “now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”, so I guess President Death would also work.
Replace the USPS? Who says there’s a replacement? There’s no replacement for the ACA if Trump kills it in court.
It’s all about destruction. Like Bannon said, cause the destruction of the administrative state. Bring it all crashing down. Replace it with an authoritarian police state after the unrest starts.
“If more states and localities sought to expand their mail-in voting operations, those vendors — who typically work with the western states that already conduct massive absentee voting operations — would need to purchase more equipment. But obtaining that equipment takes several months, National Association of Presort Mailers president Richard Gebbie told TPM after the call, and vendors wouldn’t make that seven-figure investment without the contracts to justify it.”
You would think between Bloomberg and the DNC deep pocket donors that this would be doable.
“Sir, Mr. President Corona Sir” is how all his fantasy ass-kissers phrase it.