There are 45 comments.

1. Inactive
   MISTER BITCOIN

   @MISTERBITCOIN

   9:37 PM EDT ⋅ Aug 15, 2020

   Democrats are opposed to voter ID rules and signature verification.   

   Some states allow you to ‘correct’ your signature 7 days after Election Day.

   Postal union endorses Biden:  https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-post-union-idUSKCN25A2NJ

   The 300,000-member National Association of Letter Carriers said on Friday that the union’s executive council had endorsed Democrat Joe Biden for president, warning “the very survival” of the U.S. Postal Service is at stake.

   Trump did not knee cap the postal service.  The postal service knee capped itself.

    

2. Inactive
   MISTER BITCOIN

   @MISTERBITCOIN

   9:44 PM EDT ⋅ Aug 15, 2020

   https://reason.com/2020/08/14/dont-blame-donald-trump-if-the-post-office-loses-your-vote/

   So if the USPS screws up delivering votes in a timely and efficient manner this fall, it won’t be because of any sinister actions by the White House. It will be because of longstanding, well-documented managerial and cultural problems that gave rise to such stock portrayals of letter carriers as Seinfeld’s Newman and Cheers’ Cliff Clavin. As Reason’s Eric Boehm has documented, it may take weeks or even months for a final tally of all votes this fall; depending on the closeness of the race on Election Day, that waiting period may be excrutiating to live through. But that has less to do with the USPS and more to do with local and state voting boards.

   For those who are interested in the post office’s chronically bad performance and “unsustainable” situation, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has produced a long list of studies on where the problems come from and how they might be addressed. The short version is that Congress has blocked all sorts of serious reforms to an operation that has seen a 33 percent decline in mail volume since 2006.

    

   https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-post-offices-problem-isnt-trump-11597360885?mod=newsviewer_click

   Two months into his new job, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is being keelhauled by Democrats for alleged sabotage of the U.S. Postal Service. Nearly 200 House Democrats signed a letter this week accusing him of acting to “accelerate the crisis” at the USPS. Apparently they missed the post office’s news release last Friday, when it reported losing another $2.2 billion last quarter. Congress has only itself to blame for this mess.

   That red ink is no fluke of circumstance. The post office is meant to be self-sufficient, but it hasn’t broken even for years. Total losses since 2007 run to $78 billion, according to a May report by the Government Accountability Office, which said that the “USPS’s current business model is not financially sustainable.” It’s a Blockbuster service in a Netflix world.

    

3. Inactive
   MISTER BITCOIN

   @MISTERBITCOIN

   9:45 PM EDT ⋅ Aug 15, 2020

    

   

    

4. Member
   RightAngles

   @RightAngles

   8:52 AM EDT ⋅ Aug 16, 2020

   What could go wrong?

   It’s a discovery worthy of a murder mystery: In a parking lot in the mountains outside Santa Cruz, Calif., a truck is found abandoned, the keys still hanging in the door. Inside the police find … a note? A body?

   Not quite. Try 13,000 pieces of undelivered mail.

   The recent discovery in Bonny Doon, Calif., of a former mail carrier’s old stash was not exactly unprecedented. There’s also the recent arrest of a Detroit postal carrier who squirreled away 9,000 pieces of mail into a storage locker, a work dodge worthy of a Seinfeld plot. A week earlier, a postman was nailed for hoarding 27,000 letters in Leeds, England; the week before that revealed a postal hoarder with 20,000 letters in Frankfurt, Germany. (“[He] didn’t deliver mail addressed to himself either,” a police statement dryly noted.) And all of them were dwarfed by the North Carolina postman who admitted in August to filling his garage and burying in his backyard nearly a tractor trailer’s worth of undelivered junk mail.

   But the hoarding and abandonment of mail is a phenomenon that extends at least back to 1874, when Providence, R.I., postman Benjamin Salisbury was caught throwing mail into the ocean “to avoid the trouble of delivery.” Some things don’t change much; a Long Island postman used the same MO in 1954, when he blamed a bum leg from the war for forcing him to dump his mail off a local pier. The scheme kind of worked … until the tide came in.

    

   https://slate.com/culture/2008/11/why-mailmen-don-t-deliver-the-mail.html

5. Inactive
   Jules PA

   @JulesPA

   10:27 AM EDT ⋅ Aug 16, 2020

   All it takes to completely wreck vote by mail is for mail to be jammed into machines or ripped open, or tossed. Or hijacking of mail trucks, or bombing of post offices. Or polling places. Or ballot collection boxes.

   There are maps that show party strongholds.

   Don’t doubt the resistance members.

6. Member
   RightAngles

   @RightAngles

   12:41 PM EDT ⋅ Aug 16, 2020

   Jules PA (View Comment):

   All it takes to completely wreck vote by mail is for mail to be jammed into machines or ripped open, or tossed. Or hijacking of mail trucks, or bombing of post offices. Or polling places. Or ballot collection boxes.

   There are maps that show party strongholds.

   Don’t doubt the resistance members.

   For this and so many other reasons, this is a terrible idea and should be quashed right now. Voting, especially in a presidential election, is a sacred duty and a privilege, and should be treated as such. It should be an occasion for which you have to get dressed, get in the car, and drive to the polling place. You should not be able to do it from home dressed in your pajamas. I don’t even like Motor Voter.  The more casually we have treated this, the less and less effort people have to put into it, the less seriously they take it.

7. Coolidge
   Flicker

   @Flicker

   1:10 PM EDT ⋅ Aug 16, 2020

   RightAngles (View Comment):

   Jules PA (View Comment):

   All it takes to completely wreck vote by mail is for mail to be jammed into machines or ripped open, or tossed. Or hijacking of mail trucks, or bombing of post offices. Or polling places. Or ballot collection boxes.

   There are maps that show party strongholds.

   Don’t doubt the resistance members.

   For this and so many other reasons, this is a terrible idea and should be quashed right now. Voting, especially in a presidential election, is a sacred duty and a privilege, and should be treated as such. It should be an occasion for which you have to get dressed, get in the car, and drive to the polling place. You should not be able to do it from home dressed in your pajamas. I don’t even like Motor Voter. The more casually we have treated this, the less and less effort people have to put into it, the less seriously they take it.

   Blue Thumbs!

8. Coolidge
   Stad

   @Stad

   Post author

   2:17 PM EDT ⋅ Aug 16, 2020

   RightAngles (View Comment):
   The more casually we have treated this, the less and less effort people have to put into it, the less seriously they take it.

   Brilliant point, as usual . . .

9. Inactive
   Jules PA

   @JulesPA

   2:28 PM EDT ⋅ Aug 16, 2020

   No one even knows what sacred or duty means any more.

   Just privilege, but selfishly expected, not out of something earned.

   Well, too many don’t. 

10. Member
    Muleskinner, Weasel Wrangler

    @Muleskinner

    2:35 PM EDT ⋅ Aug 16, 2020

    RightAngles (View Comment):
    The more casually we have treated this, the less and less effort people have to put into it, the less seriously they take it.

    So, the pols think they have to make it easier so more people will vote. The problem is that it appears that the easier it is to vote, the less seriously people take it, so the less they participate. Rinse and repeat.

11. Inactive
    Jon1979

    @Jon1979

    3:03 PM EDT ⋅ Aug 16, 2020

    Muleskinner, Weasel Wrangler (View Comment):

    RightAngles (View Comment):
    The more casually we have treated this, the less and less effort people have to put into it, the less seriously they take it.

    So, the pols think they have to make it easier so more people will vote. The problem is that it appears that the easier it is to vote, the less seriously people take it, so the less they participate. Rinse and repeat.

    Some pols and their supporters don’t really care if the people participate, just as long as their ballots participate. That’s been the crux of most of the mail ballot fraud problems in the past, though it normally involved ‘helping’ the elderly or the infirmed to vote. If they could identify the apathetic and help them vote as well, they’d be happy to do so.

12. Inactive
    MISTER BITCOIN

    @MISTERBITCOIN

    3:04 PM EDT ⋅ Aug 16, 2020

    RightAngles (View Comment):

    What could go wrong?

    It’s a discovery worthy of a murder mystery: In a parking lot in the mountains outside Santa Cruz, Calif., a truck is found abandoned, the keys still hanging in the door. Inside the police find … a note? A body?

    Not quite. Try 13,000 pieces of undelivered mail.

    The recent discovery in Bonny Doon, Calif., of a former mail carrier’s old stash was not exactly unprecedented. There’s also the recent arrest of a Detroit postal carrier who squirreled away 9,000 pieces of mail into a storage locker, a work dodge worthy of a Seinfeld plot. A week earlier, a postman was nailed for hoarding 27,000 letters in Leeds, England; the week before that revealed a postal hoarder with 20,000 letters in Frankfurt, Germany. (“[He] didn’t deliver mail addressed to himself either,” a police statement dryly noted.) And all of them were dwarfed by the North Carolina postman who admitted in August to filling his garage and burying in his backyard nearly a tractor trailer’s worth of undelivered junk mail.

    But the hoarding and abandonment of mail is a phenomenon that extends at least back to 1874, when Providence, R.I., postman Benjamin Salisbury was caught throwing mail into the ocean “to avoid the trouble of delivery.” Some things don’t change much; a Long Island postman used the same MO in 1954, when he blamed a bum leg from the war for forcing him to dump his mail off a local pier. The scheme kind of worked … until the tide came in.

     

    https://slate.com/culture/2008/11/why-mailmen-don-t-deliver-the-mail.html

     

    12,000 mailboxes removed between 2011 and 2016

    https://pjmedia.com/election/matt-margolis/2020/08/15/flashback-the-obama-biden-administration-removed-thousands-of-usps-collection-boxes-n796263

     

     

13. Member
    RightAngles

    @RightAngles

    3:08 PM EDT ⋅ Aug 16, 2020

    MISTER BITCOIN (View Comment):

    RightAngles (View Comment):

    What could go wrong?

    It’s a discovery worthy of a murder mystery: In a parking lot in the mountains outside Santa Cruz, Calif., a truck is found abandoned, the keys still hanging in the door. Inside the police find … a note? A body?

    Not quite. Try 13,000 pieces of undelivered mail.

    The recent discovery in Bonny Doon, Calif., of a former mail carrier’s old stash was not exactly unprecedented. There’s also the recent arrest of a Detroit postal carrier who squirreled away 9,000 pieces of mail into a storage locker, a work dodge worthy of a Seinfeld plot. A week earlier, a postman was nailed for hoarding 27,000 letters in Leeds, England; the week before that revealed a postal hoarder with 20,000 letters in Frankfurt, Germany. (“[He] didn’t deliver mail addressed to himself either,” a police statement dryly noted.) And all of them were dwarfed by the North Carolina postman who admitted in August to filling his garage and burying in his backyard nearly a tractor trailer’s worth of undelivered junk mail.

    But the hoarding and abandonment of mail is a phenomenon that extends at least back to 1874, when Providence, R.I., postman Benjamin Salisbury was caught throwing mail into the ocean “to avoid the trouble of delivery.” Some things don’t change much; a Long Island postman used the same MO in 1954, when he blamed a bum leg from the war for forcing him to dump his mail off a local pier. The scheme kind of worked … until the tide came in.

     

    https://slate.com/culture/2008/11/why-mailmen-don-t-deliver-the-mail.html

     

    12,000 mailboxes removed between 2011 and 2016

    https://pjmedia.com/election/matt-margolis/2020/08/15/flashback-the-obama-biden-administration-removed-thousands-of-usps-collection-boxes-n796263

     

    Wow. And note that the article I quoted above about all the discarded mail is from Salon.com, hardly a right-wing source. I bet they’d like to scrub it now if they remember publishing it.

14. Coolidge
    kedavis

    @kedavis

    2:40 PM EDT ⋅ Aug 17, 2020

    RightAngles (View Comment):

    And they’re already all over the media trying to pave the way to cry “Voter Fraud” when Trump wins. I saw one of them on the news last night talking about how some new guy in charge at the Post Office is “Trump’s crony,” so they can later claim he somehow tampered with the mail-in votes which the Dems are the ones pushing for.

    Isn’t it odd that “voter fraud” doesn’t exist according to the left until people vote for Trump?

15. Member
    Henry Castaigne

    @HenryCastaigne

    4:31 PM EDT ⋅ Aug 17, 2020

    kedavis (View Comment):

    RightAngles (View Comment):

    And they’re already all over the media trying to pave the way to cry “Voter Fraud” when Trump wins. I saw one of them on the news last night talking about how some new guy in charge at the Post Office is “Trump’s crony,” so they can later claim he somehow tampered with the mail-in votes which the Dems are the ones pushing for.

    Isn’t it odd that “voter fraud” doesn’t exist according to the left until people vote for Trump?

    All morality is contingent on advancing the party.