USPS Responds As Judge Brings Down Hammer On Ballot Delivery

Albeit grudgingly, the USPS coughed up statistics Wednesday ordered by a vexed federal judge about late deliveries and extra trips to collect mail as voters across the country worry that their ballots will not be delivered in time to be counted. 


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1340997
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I’d write a letter to tell you all how bad its been in Michigan but I’m afraid it wouldn’t get to you for another 3 weeks…

Seriously though, they changed out my familiar and routine postal worker in the last week and a half too. This week I’ve had a different mail carrier every day. That kinda makes it slower if the person is less familiar with the route. My mail gets here towards the end of the afternoon now. Used to be here by noon.

Guess all those sorting machines were important after all. Maybe a new Democratic Congress can authorize new up-to-date state of the art sorting machines to replace the ones DeNoJoy told them to destroy. And while they’re at it, stop trying to force them to fund their pensions 75 years into the future. That’s bullshit too.

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Step one should be to reverse the disastrous W Bush-era financial requirement that the USPS fund its retirement fund 75 years into the future. That alone was meant to cripple the USPS so that private businesses could take over delivery. The problem is the private companies want nothing to do with delivering to every address, only the profitable areas. Step two should be to allow postal offices to serve as community banks.

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They managed to fuck things up enough that my friend mailed out payments last month for her mortgage and her bills and none of the payments got there. It made the biggest mess for her.

On the other hand AmericaVotes just put up a website where Texans can track their mail in ballots - this is a first. My ballot was received on October 4. Yay!

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Judge Emmet Sullivan has tangled with this administration before re: Michael Flynn.

That detailed list of demands was completely on target for these snakes.

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Judge Emmet Sullivan

He’s now doing God’s work.

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I just want to note that I’ve been experiencing the exact same issue. Different carriers and mail is now delayed from what used to be 12-12:30pm to mid or even late afternoon. This has been going on for the past several months.

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We had a carrier in this neighborhood whom we adored. We all went to his wedding in February.

They’ve reassigned him.

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Thank goodness Judge Sullivan has (not yet) been replaced by a Federalist Society lackey. He is a truly independent arbiter of the law; you know, the type of judge who should have been nominated to sit on the Supreme Court.

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It’s worse than bullshit. It’s a congressionally mandated self-funding privatization scheme. Sell off USPS, the buyer purchases legislation to return the USPS pension scheme to “normal” (by US standards), and presto–the excess pension funding covers the cost of acquisition, and then some.

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The USPS met the Wednesday morning deadline and provided the requested statistics, though not without griping about it.

“As explained in Defendants’ opposition, this data is not appropriate for evaluating the Postal Service’s performance throughout a week, and weekly data is significantly more useful for evaluating the Postal Service’s performance across multiple weeks,” government lawyers wrote. “Accordingly, Defendants maintain that the data possesses little to no analytical value and should not be considered a reliable indicator of performance.”

Dude we don’t have a 7 days to analyze your screw ups.

So yesterday was a first, I have one drive with which I share with a neighbor that lives behind me. I went and picked up my mail late afternoon, and the majority of the mail was for my neighbor. Which hasn’t happened before, or at least hasn’t happened in the number of pieces that found in my box. And to me what’s weird is that the mail truck delivers to them first, and when I placed the ones for them from my box into theirs they had mail addressed to them and delivered correctly.

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How did they get access? Does texas sell lists of who has already voted, to inform campaigns’ GOTV efforts?

The reason I know this is intentional is that my mail carrier is also my neighbor and she told me the supervisors above them are still ordering time constraints and various other restrictions. Also, right now they’re made to prioritize delivery of political ads and leaflets by the two campaigns, as well as those that come from third party interests and SuperPACs to every address before the election. That takes extra time to scoop up for their routes. In other words, the powers that be are trying really hard to continue to muck things up.

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I think he’s just saying that day by day reports are statistically very noisy and that weekly averages are a more useful number.

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I have no idea.

Texas made it possible already for military voters to track their ballots. They could have expanded on that I don’t know. I’m just grateful we can finally know whether our ballot made it to the early voting clerk and mine and my husband’s did.

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I sent a birthday card to my sister (who lives in coastal SC) on the 17th, and it arrived on the 26th.
Normal delivery would have been 2 or three days.

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I have access to BallotTrax and I was tickled to see this.

Ballot Accepted

10/07/2020

Your ballot has been accepted! Your ballot was received by your county elections office and will be counted.

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That just pisses me off.

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Its public knowledge who votes. Every campaign has those lists and can be gotten easily. I think they pay for those lists. My son had those lists when he worked for a candidate years back in order to see who was a committed voter, who voted sporadically and who didn’t vote much at all. They don’t know who you vote for but they know when you voted and what years you cast a ballot. I was pleased to see I was an above average voter. I’ll even vote in off-year elections when only one person is on the ballot.

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Dude we don’t have 7 days aggregate to look at what you said you did, or undid, to rely your on lip service that you undid did

.

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