10 ms·

The machines USPS is removing can sort more than 36,000 pieces of mail per hour

131 points by woldemariam 6y ago

missedthecue 6y ago
I heard that this was because mail volume is falling through the floor while parcel volume is nearing record highs each day. Given that there only a limited amount of floor space in mail sorting facilities, it makes sense to remove unneeded letter sorting machines to replace with parcel sorting machines.
- jinushaun 6y ago
  Except you’re going to have an unprecedented amount of letter mail coming in November! These changes should have occurred post election, if cost was a concern.
  - TMWNN 6y ago
    No. Two extra letters per household (one ballot, then one returned ballot), largely spread out over days or weeks, is just not that much more volume for the USPS. That's of course the maximum; in practice the average per household will be much lower than that. Further, as stated elsewhere, non-package mail volume has collapsed because of COVID19. What does matter is the backend, the infrastructure for counties and states that previously did not use mail ballots, or only used them for absentee voting, to a) properly send them out to the right recipients, then b) accept and process them. All this a) of course has to be done by early October to give voters a month before election day, and b) has nothing to do with the USPS.
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      I think you make a good point, but little nitpick, many (most?) households have more than one adult.
      - TMWNN 6y ago
        True. But my larger point is that even aside from the current drop in overall USPS non-package volume, the USPS has a lot of experience in handling lots of mail. Think of every adult in every household receiving tax documents from the IRS and every employer, bank, and other financial company in January, then many/most of those same adults mailing tax returns to the IRS and state tax agencies by April 15.
      - Izkata 6y ago
        Multiply the junk mail by the same number of adults. I used to get a couple a day (mass-mailed banking/internet/etc advertisements), but it seems to have tapered off with the pandemic.
  - savanaly 6y ago
    How so? People regularly get several pieces of legitimate mail per week, not even counting spam which if you did they get countless pieces of mail per week. How can one extra piece of mail for the entire year cause an “unprecedented" volume? Maybe if voting involved daily notices being sent out for weeks on end it might move the needle but the presidential election is a far cry from that.
    - urmathisodd 6y ago
      In our lifetime an election coinciding with a pandemic is unprecedented. There will be, again in our lifetime, with our logistics afforded by modern technology, an unprecedented number of ballots cast by mail. Casual use of language riled dad up. Give him his clicker and lean the recliner back for him. He’ll calm down. You know basically every point in history is somehow “unprecedented”. It’s never been that way before! Save it for when dad says it’s really special though.
    - MPSimmons 6y ago
      Some people get mail every week. Not everyone does. And certainly not all at the same time. I've worked a logistics building before. The single worst day of the entire month was the day TV Guide went out. The entire facility was drowning in TV guides, with a box going to every grocery store in the country. Imagine that, but orders of magnitude more deliveries. And then take out the sorting equipment.
      - Rebelgecko 6y ago
        At least where I live, ballots don't all go out on the same day. Nor are they returned on the same day. Plus I'd imagine that mailing out 200 million ballots pales in comparison to the December rush at the post office
    - brnt 6y ago
      I go months without receiving legitimate mail. Basically only when some company changes something in a contract and such. And the tax office every now and then of course.
    - 6y ago
  - pupdogg 6y ago
    I have a question in regards to voter fraud mitigation: Exactly how would you ensure a person or identity is not deceased? We received a mail-in ballot for my grandmother the other day and she passed away in 2017.
    - NickNameNick 6y ago
      I'm pretty sure the ballots haven't gone out yet. You probably received a registration form.
      - toast0 6y ago
        They may have recieved a ballot for a different contest. Washington state recently had state wide primaries, other states may have primaries going on now, or whatever local elections are happening.
    - noodlesUK 6y ago
      Most states/counties/municipalities have electronic death registration systems. For the vast majority of deceased voters, the EDRS will have been correctly filed, and a death certificate issued. At least, this is how things are supposed to work... Anything at government scale is hard.
    - bestnameever 6y ago
      they cross reference it some how. CNN had someone on from Washington State who said they received less than 200 ballots from deceased individuals in the last election so they are able to track it and ignore them.
    - strbean 6y ago
      https://www.archives.gov/research/vital-records https://www.archives.gov/research/vital-records
    - specialist 6y ago
      That's very inconsiderate and unfortunate. I'm sorry, both for your loss and the recurring reminder. Please tell both your county and state that she's passed. Election administration in jurisdictions I studied have data feeds for deaths. Her death certificate and her voter registration details were not properly matched. It happens. Record linking across disparate demographic databases is not perfect. Generally, but YMMV: States admin their statewide voter registration (VRDB), with the largest counties co-managing their own subset. Some groups of states share their VRDBs, to better scrub for changes of address and so forth. County auditors (or equiv) conduct election administration. Like candidate filing, issuing ballots, signature verification, tabulation. In a perfect world, someone would notice if a postal ballot was signed and dated after your grandma passed.
  - Shivetya 6y ago
    No you are not. The PO handles over four hundred million pieces of mail PER day. The amount, even if every voter used the mail and every voter mailed it on the same day, would not overload their system. Heck it won't even reach sorting facilities all at the same time and some will lag over three days All you have to remember about this story is, Democrats have promised to bail out the pension system of the Post Office and so the union representing them has thrown their support behind all DNC candidates. You do realize that the big unspoken promise with an all Democrat Washington is they are to shore up ALL public employee pension systems which would make the debt that even Trump and the pandemic ran up look like pocket change. America is on its way to be fleeced and the irrationals are lining up because they stopped thinking long ago when hate took over
    - mindslight 6y ago
      Explicitly funding defined-benefit pension obligations is more like the reckoning from fleecing that took place long ago. If you philosophically agree with the 2006 mandate that USPS prefund its pension, then you should accept that USPS needs increased funding to implement it. With regards to fleecing in general, both parties are in on the game (see: all that newly printed money propping up the stock market, for a less partisan example). But at least one of these parties isn't trying to actively undermine the stability of the country by helping a pandemic spread unchecked or fueling race riots. Like it or not, the Democratic Party has become the conservative option.
      - missedthecue 6y ago
        The prefunding period ended in 2016. It is not too blame for current money losing word.
        mindslight 6y ago
        I don't know how that goal has actually progressed - governmental deadlines are often pushed and there are plenty of ways to technically meet the deadline by taking on other debt. The comment I was responding to was talking about increasing funding as "bailing out" the pensions, so they at least think the pension is still a problem. As far as the USPS costing money to run in current world conditions. First it is a public service, of course it costs money. Second, since its rates are set by congress, congress could easily fix the problem by changing the rates.
  - wavepruner 6y ago
    There's way more mail during the holidays than what would be generated by a national mail-in election. So it is not unprecedented.
  - wiseleo 6y ago
    Christmas cards volume would dwarf election volume easily. You are looking at a many to many relationship vs a finite number of ballots.
- TMWNN 6y ago
  Correct. Volume of flats (exactly what it sounds like; mail that can be bent, basically) has plummetted since COVID19 began, while Priority Mail is no longer 2-3 days to anywhere in the US.
  - urmathisodd 6y ago
    Correct according to 1 in 7 billion! Ok maybe a few more might agree but there’s no such thing as absolute correctness given the context Economics are not laws of physics. As evidenced by constant “wasteful” spending and production. If they were laws of physics, nature wouldn’t allow us to behave that way. It would dial in the behavior like the color of hair. You’re no sky wizard. Just a self aggrandizing ass like the rest of us.
- dr-detroit 6y ago
  The USPS does what we say because we pay them they don't get to decide that we can't vote by mail because of some arbitrary excuse that makes you feel good about it.
- consumer451 6y ago
  That is not the case at all. There is no need to speculate as the President has made his rationale clear: > President Donald Trump frankly acknowledged that he’s starving the U.S. Postal Service of money to make it harder to process an expected surge of mail-in ballots, which he worries could cost him reelection. https://apnews.com/ece1f6e9cea1b2aa0a8c6af7ca003f26 https://apnews.com/ece1f6e9cea1b2aa0a8c6af7ca003f26
  - TMWNN 6y ago
    That's the AP's wholly unfounded interpretation of what Trump said. Later on the article quotes him as saying >"They want $3.5 billion for something that will turn out to be fraudulent. That’s election money, basically," Trump said during Thursday’s call-in interview. As I wrote elsewhere, the difficulty with a large-scale increase in mail ballots does not lie with the USPS, but with states and counties without experience with mail ballots, or only with mail absentee votes, that needs to set up the infrastructure to mail them only to eligible voters and receive and process them in November. That's tough to do by early October (giving voters 30 days before Election Day).
    - rgbrenner 6y ago
      "Wholly unfounded" ??? “They need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo. “If they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.”
      - TMWNN 6y ago
        As I quoted earlier, Trump pointed out the fraud potential in doing so, especially given the little time remaining before ballots have to go out.
        sjwright 6y ago
        If underfunding the post office could combat fraud, that argument would make sense. In reality, a dysfunctional post office will have little effect on highly motivated fraudsters and will disenfranchise the millions of people for whom vote-by-mail isn't a mere convenience. In fact Trump's rhetoric will be especially motivating for pro-Trump fraudsters who will feel morally vindicated by the endless accusations of fraud by Democrats.
- lightlyused 6y ago
  Even so, how was he able to determine that this was the right action in the short amount of time he has been on the job?
- urmathisodd 6y ago
  Yeah, sure, the economic math is the only math that matters in this context. Must be nice to be a white male with a sure sense of your political voice mattering.
- r00fus 6y ago
  This sounds like the kind of semi-meaningful answer you can expect to cover up the real answer: corruption.
- hatenberg 6y ago
  Occams Razor dude.
- djaque 6y ago
  There are only 78 days until the election. At this point, even the appearance of meddling with the mail before a record mail-in election is unacceptable.
- craftinator 6y ago
  I know some postal workers due to a family relationship. They've had sorting machines removed, but said personal and business mail has actually been increased since March... So it appears, from an n=3, that "declining mail volume" is untrue.
jimjimjimmy 6y ago
Mail gets lost, do we want lost votes? https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/covid-19-vote-by-mail-ballot-counted-election/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/covid-...
- flowerlad 6y ago
  Ever heard of "hanging chads"? There is no perfect system.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    There is no perfect system? In the UK we have fully paper elections that basically run without a hitch year on year. Why do you need a voting machine at all? They just give you a pencil in the booth I do see people arguing in the UK for electronic voting and Blockchain, which is worrying.
    - bastawhiz 6y ago
      Let's all hope that they do not give you a PENCIL of all things to fill out a ballot with.
      - mhh__ 6y ago
        Why?
        rsfern 6y ago
        Presumably because a ballot filled out in pencil is not immutable — the pencil marks could be erased!
        mhh__ 6y ago
        That's why the sealed ballot boxes are accompanied by by two officers and the candidates are all present at the count. If you tampered with the ballot it would only be discarded due to the rubber marking in the "wrong" box
EFruit 6y ago
Thinking from a different perspective, in a majority mail-in election, could these machines pose a risk to the election's integrity? They would most likely not be undergoing the same scrutiny as electronic voting systems (which in many places is already a very low bar...), and they are most likely vulnerable to as many other problems and exploits as any other system.
- organsnyder 6y ago
  They're not responsible for counting votes. In many states (maybe most/all?), there is additional tracking done by the state department overseeing the elections to track when ballots are received. For instance, in Michigan I can check the MI Secretary of State's website to verify that my ballot has been counted.
  - pxeboot 6y ago
    Hypothetically, could they could be used to 'accidentally" route hundreds of ballots from an important zip code through nowhere Alaska, causing them to be delayed weeks/months and not counted?
    - jcrawfordor 6y ago
      Quite possibly, but this would be easily detectable after the fact as standard mail-in voting practices provide end-to-end tracking of the ballot. Most election security measures, including ballot stuffing in most systems, are really only detected after the fact.
    - sangli 6y ago
      I worked for a company that manufactured these machines including electro-mechanical systems as well as the software that used for configuration and generating reports. The way it works is, these machines would either read the printed barcode or take a picture of the label and run through OCR engine, use the zip+4 and sort them to a bin based on some configuration. Then these bins would go on a truck to their destination. The machines are not doing the routing. So your fears are unfounded.
yters 6y ago
I don't get how their address recognition technology seems to work so well with all the handwritten addresses. I am assuming it is mostly automated.
- dtparr 6y ago
  OCR of handwriting has come a long way, but it's a lot easier to do a good job when you have a database of every valid address and can bounce your OCR probabilities off that database to fuzzy match your way there.
- toast0 6y ago
  A very high volume of mail is machine addressed (much of it uses printed address barcodes too). Many people have legible handwriting, so those can get a barcode added when they hit the system. The remaining letters addressed by people like me can get exception processing. If the zip code is legible, at least it can route to the right post office and get figured out there, otherwise, it can make its way to a dead letter office for help.
- supernova87a 6y ago
  Handwriting recognition is like the canonical problem to solve, that they teach in the introduction to every textbook. The USPS has billions of letters. You would expect they have it right by now.
- technofiend 6y ago
  The answer is if a machine can't decode it, a human does. One of my aunts worked as a postal worker for a while many years ago. She was hired for her ability to both read and type quickly. She reviewed addresses that couldn't be automatically recognized and did some sort of encoding that (I believe) generated that yellow printed barcode you see on some letters. At least according to Atlas Obscura OCR has improved to the point that there's only one remote encoding site left and it's in Salt Lake City. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/usps-remote-encoding-facility https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/usps-remote-encoding-fac...
- gnicholas 6y ago
  I assume they disambiguate using the zip code. If you've got the correct zip code (or even just part of the correct zip code) you can really narrow things down. I don't have the best handwriting, but I always try to write the zip code legibly on the assumption that if my letter gets to the right neighborhood, the local post office will be able to recognize the full address easily enough.
Rebelgecko 6y ago
All of this uproar about sorting machines is really frustrating to me, because no one seems to be writing about the utilization of the existing machines. If they were previously only 50% utilized, this seems like a reasonable thing to do for efficiency (kind of like how the post office (re)moves thousands of collection boxes every single due to lack of use, but everyone is suddenly upset because they're removing a dozen boxes in Middle of Nowhere, Montana that only get a few letters per day)
- Craighead 6y ago
  Where is your source? HN posting guidelines are specific about sourcing claims. Where are you getting these usage statistics from?
- djaque 6y ago
  > no one seems to be writing about the utilization of the existing machines First off, that's wrong. Like three of the top comments here are talking about it. Second, if it's about efficiency then it needs to wait until after our record mail-in election. There is no excuse for providing even so much as the image of election tampering.
  - Rebelgecko 6y ago
    To clarify, I mean that no one is talking about actual real numbers wrt utilization. It's all speculation. Let's say we give USPS the benefit of the doubt and assume that these machines are unnecessary. It would be irresponsible to keep using them because of the election. If the linked article is correct that these machines typically have 2 employees assigned to them each, there could be a thousand employees or more whose work is totally pointless. I would much prefer that those 1000 employees be reassigned to do useful work instead of this boondoggle. Is it better to assign 1000 workers to perform "productivity theater" instead of having them help with the mail? IMO it isn't. What's more like election tampering? 1. Reassigning redundant workers to more useful tasks 2. Misappropriating the labor of 1000 employees to avoid the appearance of election tampering
    - 6y ago
lma21 6y ago
We're seeing major things happening around the world. The biggest of them is seeing the US slowly head into an autocracy (quite implicitly). Trump is doing whatever Trump wants, and no one is stopping him. How so?
djaque 6y ago
I am genuinely concerned for the November election. Even putting the dismantling of the USPS in the most favorable light, president Trump has managed to convince a chunk of his base that this year's presidential election will not be legitimate. We may end up in a situation where Donald Trump loses and part of the country truly believes the Biden was elected illegitimately. I'm not sure what will happen, but it won't be good for our democracy.
- mikelward 6y ago
  This article argues that the mail-in ballots will favor Democrats, and that close calls on election night will turn into clear wins for Democrats once all the mail-in ballots are counted. With people being used to news media "calling" the election on election night, before the result is official, and with Trump calling the legitimacy of the election into doubt, it could get messy. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/brace-blue-shift/615097 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/brace-blue...
  - scsilver 6y ago
    The interesting part is him pulling off this stalemate and not having a clear winner doesnt result in the president gaining legal power past the end of his term, it just puts the power back to the house (if the states have their elections, with pelosi likely being acting president) or the senate if no house memebers are elected, Republicans losing 23 to 12 democratic senators this term. If there is no election dems regain the executive and the senate.
- ghthor 6y ago
  Like how the MSM spent 3 years trying to convince the public that the 2016 election wasn't legitimate?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - quickthrowman 6y ago

131 points by woldemariam 6y ago

I heard that this was because mail volume is falling through the floor while parcel volume is nearing record highs each day. Given that there only a limited amount of floor space in mail sorting facilities, it makes sense to remove unneeded letter sorting machines to replace with parcel sorting machines.

jinushaun 6y ago
Except you’re going to have an unprecedented amount of letter mail coming in November! These changes should have occurred post election, if cost was a concern.
- TMWNN 6y ago
  No. Two extra letters per household (one ballot, then one returned ballot), largely spread out over days or weeks, is just not that much more volume for the USPS. That's of course the maximum; in practice the average per household will be much lower than that. Further, as stated elsewhere, non-package mail volume has collapsed because of COVID19. What does matter is the backend, the infrastructure for counties and states that previously did not use mail ballots, or only used them for absentee voting, to a) properly send them out to the right recipients, then b) accept and process them. All this a) of course has to be done by early October to give voters a month before election day, and b) has nothing to do with the USPS.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    I think you make a good point, but little nitpick, many (most?) households have more than one adult.
    - TMWNN 6y ago
      True. But my larger point is that even aside from the current drop in overall USPS non-package volume, the USPS has a lot of experience in handling lots of mail. Think of every adult in every household receiving tax documents from the IRS and every employer, bank, and other financial company in January, then many/most of those same adults mailing tax returns to the IRS and state tax agencies by April 15.
    - Izkata 6y ago
      Multiply the junk mail by the same number of adults. I used to get a couple a day (mass-mailed banking/internet/etc advertisements), but it seems to have tapered off with the pandemic.
- savanaly 6y ago
  How so? People regularly get several pieces of legitimate mail per week, not even counting spam which if you did they get countless pieces of mail per week. How can one extra piece of mail for the entire year cause an “unprecedented" volume? Maybe if voting involved daily notices being sent out for weeks on end it might move the needle but the presidential election is a far cry from that.
  - urmathisodd 6y ago
    In our lifetime an election coinciding with a pandemic is unprecedented. There will be, again in our lifetime, with our logistics afforded by modern technology, an unprecedented number of ballots cast by mail. Casual use of language riled dad up. Give him his clicker and lean the recliner back for him. He’ll calm down. You know basically every point in history is somehow “unprecedented”. It’s never been that way before! Save it for when dad says it’s really special though.
  - MPSimmons 6y ago
    Some people get mail every week. Not everyone does. And certainly not all at the same time. I've worked a logistics building before. The single worst day of the entire month was the day TV Guide went out. The entire facility was drowning in TV guides, with a box going to every grocery store in the country. Imagine that, but orders of magnitude more deliveries. And then take out the sorting equipment.
    - Rebelgecko 6y ago
      At least where I live, ballots don't all go out on the same day. Nor are they returned on the same day. Plus I'd imagine that mailing out 200 million ballots pales in comparison to the December rush at the post office
  - brnt 6y ago
    I go months without receiving legitimate mail. Basically only when some company changes something in a contract and such. And the tax office every now and then of course.
  - 6y ago
- pupdogg 6y ago
  I have a question in regards to voter fraud mitigation: Exactly how would you ensure a person or identity is not deceased? We received a mail-in ballot for my grandmother the other day and she passed away in 2017.
  - NickNameNick 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure the ballots haven't gone out yet. You probably received a registration form.
    - toast0 6y ago
      They may have recieved a ballot for a different contest. Washington state recently had state wide primaries, other states may have primaries going on now, or whatever local elections are happening.
  - noodlesUK 6y ago
    Most states/counties/municipalities have electronic death registration systems. For the vast majority of deceased voters, the EDRS will have been correctly filed, and a death certificate issued. At least, this is how things are supposed to work... Anything at government scale is hard.
  - bestnameever 6y ago
    they cross reference it some how. CNN had someone on from Washington State who said they received less than 200 ballots from deceased individuals in the last election so they are able to track it and ignore them.
  - strbean 6y ago
    https://www.archives.gov/research/vital-records https://www.archives.gov/research/vital-records
  - specialist 6y ago
    That's very inconsiderate and unfortunate. I'm sorry, both for your loss and the recurring reminder. Please tell both your county and state that she's passed. Election administration in jurisdictions I studied have data feeds for deaths. Her death certificate and her voter registration details were not properly matched. It happens. Record linking across disparate demographic databases is not perfect. Generally, but YMMV: States admin their statewide voter registration (VRDB), with the largest counties co-managing their own subset. Some groups of states share their VRDBs, to better scrub for changes of address and so forth. County auditors (or equiv) conduct election administration. Like candidate filing, issuing ballots, signature verification, tabulation. In a perfect world, someone would notice if a postal ballot was signed and dated after your grandma passed.
- Shivetya 6y ago
  No you are not. The PO handles over four hundred million pieces of mail PER day. The amount, even if every voter used the mail and every voter mailed it on the same day, would not overload their system. Heck it won't even reach sorting facilities all at the same time and some will lag over three days All you have to remember about this story is, Democrats have promised to bail out the pension system of the Post Office and so the union representing them has thrown their support behind all DNC candidates. You do realize that the big unspoken promise with an all Democrat Washington is they are to shore up ALL public employee pension systems which would make the debt that even Trump and the pandemic ran up look like pocket change. America is on its way to be fleeced and the irrationals are lining up because they stopped thinking long ago when hate took over
  - mindslight 6y ago
    Explicitly funding defined-benefit pension obligations is more like the reckoning from fleecing that took place long ago. If you philosophically agree with the 2006 mandate that USPS prefund its pension, then you should accept that USPS needs increased funding to implement it. With regards to fleecing in general, both parties are in on the game (see: all that newly printed money propping up the stock market, for a less partisan example). But at least one of these parties isn't trying to actively undermine the stability of the country by helping a pandemic spread unchecked or fueling race riots. Like it or not, the Democratic Party has become the conservative option.
    - missedthecue 6y ago
      The prefunding period ended in 2016. It is not too blame for current money losing word.
      - mindslight 6y ago
        I don't know how that goal has actually progressed - governmental deadlines are often pushed and there are plenty of ways to technically meet the deadline by taking on other debt. The comment I was responding to was talking about increasing funding as "bailing out" the pensions, so they at least think the pension is still a problem. As far as the USPS costing money to run in current world conditions. First it is a public service, of course it costs money. Second, since its rates are set by congress, congress could easily fix the problem by changing the rates.
- wavepruner 6y ago
  There's way more mail during the holidays than what would be generated by a national mail-in election. So it is not unprecedented.
- wiseleo 6y ago
  Christmas cards volume would dwarf election volume easily. You are looking at a many to many relationship vs a finite number of ballots.
TMWNN 6y ago
Correct. Volume of flats (exactly what it sounds like; mail that can be bent, basically) has plummetted since COVID19 began, while Priority Mail is no longer 2-3 days to anywhere in the US.
- urmathisodd 6y ago
  Correct according to 1 in 7 billion! Ok maybe a few more might agree but there’s no such thing as absolute correctness given the context Economics are not laws of physics. As evidenced by constant “wasteful” spending and production. If they were laws of physics, nature wouldn’t allow us to behave that way. It would dial in the behavior like the color of hair. You’re no sky wizard. Just a self aggrandizing ass like the rest of us.
dr-detroit 6y ago
The USPS does what we say because we pay them they don't get to decide that we can't vote by mail because of some arbitrary excuse that makes you feel good about it.
consumer451 6y ago
That is not the case at all. There is no need to speculate as the President has made his rationale clear: > President Donald Trump frankly acknowledged that he’s starving the U.S. Postal Service of money to make it harder to process an expected surge of mail-in ballots, which he worries could cost him reelection. https://apnews.com/ece1f6e9cea1b2aa0a8c6af7ca003f26 https://apnews.com/ece1f6e9cea1b2aa0a8c6af7ca003f26
- TMWNN 6y ago
  That's the AP's wholly unfounded interpretation of what Trump said. Later on the article quotes him as saying >"They want $3.5 billion for something that will turn out to be fraudulent. That’s election money, basically," Trump said during Thursday’s call-in interview. As I wrote elsewhere, the difficulty with a large-scale increase in mail ballots does not lie with the USPS, but with states and counties without experience with mail ballots, or only with mail absentee votes, that needs to set up the infrastructure to mail them only to eligible voters and receive and process them in November. That's tough to do by early October (giving voters 30 days before Election Day).
  - rgbrenner 6y ago
    "Wholly unfounded" ??? “They need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo. “If they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.”
    - TMWNN 6y ago
      As I quoted earlier, Trump pointed out the fraud potential in doing so, especially given the little time remaining before ballots have to go out.
      - sjwright 6y ago
        If underfunding the post office could combat fraud, that argument would make sense. In reality, a dysfunctional post office will have little effect on highly motivated fraudsters and will disenfranchise the millions of people for whom vote-by-mail isn't a mere convenience. In fact Trump's rhetoric will be especially motivating for pro-Trump fraudsters who will feel morally vindicated by the endless accusations of fraud by Democrats.
lightlyused 6y ago
Even so, how was he able to determine that this was the right action in the short amount of time he has been on the job?
urmathisodd 6y ago
Yeah, sure, the economic math is the only math that matters in this context. Must be nice to be a white male with a sure sense of your political voice mattering.
r00fus 6y ago
This sounds like the kind of semi-meaningful answer you can expect to cover up the real answer: corruption.
hatenberg 6y ago
Occams Razor dude.
djaque 6y ago
There are only 78 days until the election. At this point, even the appearance of meddling with the mail before a record mail-in election is unacceptable.
craftinator 6y ago
I know some postal workers due to a family relationship. They've had sorting machines removed, but said personal and business mail has actually been increased since March... So it appears, from an n=3, that "declining mail volume" is untrue.

jimjimjimmy 6y ago

Mail gets lost, do we want lost votes? https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/covid-19-vote-by-mail-ballot-counted-election/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/covid-...

flowerlad 6y ago
Ever heard of "hanging chads"? There is no perfect system.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  There is no perfect system? In the UK we have fully paper elections that basically run without a hitch year on year. Why do you need a voting machine at all? They just give you a pencil in the booth I do see people arguing in the UK for electronic voting and Blockchain, which is worrying.
  - bastawhiz 6y ago
    Let's all hope that they do not give you a PENCIL of all things to fill out a ballot with.
    - mhh__ 6y ago
      Why?
      - rsfern 6y ago
        Presumably because a ballot filled out in pencil is not immutable — the pencil marks could be erased!
        mhh__ 6y ago
        That's why the sealed ballot boxes are accompanied by by two officers and the candidates are all present at the count. If you tampered with the ballot it would only be discarded due to the rubber marking in the "wrong" box

EFruit 6y ago

Thinking from a different perspective, in a majority mail-in election, could these machines pose a risk to the election's integrity? They would most likely not be undergoing the same scrutiny as electronic voting systems (which in many places is already a very low bar...), and they are most likely vulnerable to as many other problems and exploits as any other system.

organsnyder 6y ago
They're not responsible for counting votes. In many states (maybe most/all?), there is additional tracking done by the state department overseeing the elections to track when ballots are received. For instance, in Michigan I can check the MI Secretary of State's website to verify that my ballot has been counted.
- pxeboot 6y ago
  Hypothetically, could they could be used to 'accidentally" route hundreds of ballots from an important zip code through nowhere Alaska, causing them to be delayed weeks/months and not counted?
  - jcrawfordor 6y ago
    Quite possibly, but this would be easily detectable after the fact as standard mail-in voting practices provide end-to-end tracking of the ballot. Most election security measures, including ballot stuffing in most systems, are really only detected after the fact.
  - sangli 6y ago
    I worked for a company that manufactured these machines including electro-mechanical systems as well as the software that used for configuration and generating reports. The way it works is, these machines would either read the printed barcode or take a picture of the label and run through OCR engine, use the zip+4 and sort them to a bin based on some configuration. Then these bins would go on a truck to their destination. The machines are not doing the routing. So your fears are unfounded.

yters 6y ago

I don't get how their address recognition technology seems to work so well with all the handwritten addresses. I am assuming it is mostly automated.

dtparr 6y ago
OCR of handwriting has come a long way, but it's a lot easier to do a good job when you have a database of every valid address and can bounce your OCR probabilities off that database to fuzzy match your way there.
toast0 6y ago
A very high volume of mail is machine addressed (much of it uses printed address barcodes too). Many people have legible handwriting, so those can get a barcode added when they hit the system. The remaining letters addressed by people like me can get exception processing. If the zip code is legible, at least it can route to the right post office and get figured out there, otherwise, it can make its way to a dead letter office for help.
supernova87a 6y ago
Handwriting recognition is like the canonical problem to solve, that they teach in the introduction to every textbook. The USPS has billions of letters. You would expect they have it right by now.
technofiend 6y ago
The answer is if a machine can't decode it, a human does. One of my aunts worked as a postal worker for a while many years ago. She was hired for her ability to both read and type quickly. She reviewed addresses that couldn't be automatically recognized and did some sort of encoding that (I believe) generated that yellow printed barcode you see on some letters. At least according to Atlas Obscura OCR has improved to the point that there's only one remote encoding site left and it's in Salt Lake City. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/usps-remote-encoding-facility https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/usps-remote-encoding-fac...
gnicholas 6y ago
I assume they disambiguate using the zip code. If you've got the correct zip code (or even just part of the correct zip code) you can really narrow things down. I don't have the best handwriting, but I always try to write the zip code legibly on the assumption that if my letter gets to the right neighborhood, the local post office will be able to recognize the full address easily enough.

Rebelgecko 6y ago

All of this uproar about sorting machines is really frustrating to me, because no one seems to be writing about the utilization of the existing machines. If they were previously only 50% utilized, this seems like a reasonable thing to do for efficiency (kind of like how the post office (re)moves thousands of collection boxes every single due to lack of use, but everyone is suddenly upset because they're removing a dozen boxes in Middle of Nowhere, Montana that only get a few letters per day)

Craighead 6y ago
Where is your source? HN posting guidelines are specific about sourcing claims. Where are you getting these usage statistics from?
djaque 6y ago
> no one seems to be writing about the utilization of the existing machines First off, that's wrong. Like three of the top comments here are talking about it. Second, if it's about efficiency then it needs to wait until after our record mail-in election. There is no excuse for providing even so much as the image of election tampering.
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  To clarify, I mean that no one is talking about actual real numbers wrt utilization. It's all speculation. Let's say we give USPS the benefit of the doubt and assume that these machines are unnecessary. It would be irresponsible to keep using them because of the election. If the linked article is correct that these machines typically have 2 employees assigned to them each, there could be a thousand employees or more whose work is totally pointless. I would much prefer that those 1000 employees be reassigned to do useful work instead of this boondoggle. Is it better to assign 1000 workers to perform "productivity theater" instead of having them help with the mail? IMO it isn't. What's more like election tampering? 1. Reassigning redundant workers to more useful tasks 2. Misappropriating the labor of 1000 employees to avoid the appearance of election tampering
  - 6y ago

lma21 6y ago

We're seeing major things happening around the world. The biggest of them is seeing the US slowly head into an autocracy (quite implicitly). Trump is doing whatever Trump wants, and no one is stopping him. How so?

djaque 6y ago

I am genuinely concerned for the November election. Even putting the dismantling of the USPS in the most favorable light, president Trump has managed to convince a chunk of his base that this year's presidential election will not be legitimate. We may end up in a situation where Donald Trump loses and part of the country truly believes the Biden was elected illegitimately. I'm not sure what will happen, but it won't be good for our democracy.

mikelward 6y ago
This article argues that the mail-in ballots will favor Democrats, and that close calls on election night will turn into clear wins for Democrats once all the mail-in ballots are counted. With people being used to news media "calling" the election on election night, before the result is official, and with Trump calling the legitimacy of the election into doubt, it could get messy. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/brace-blue-shift/615097 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/brace-blue...
- scsilver 6y ago
  The interesting part is him pulling off this stalemate and not having a clear winner doesnt result in the president gaining legal power past the end of his term, it just puts the power back to the house (if the states have their elections, with pelosi likely being acting president) or the senate if no house memebers are elected, Republicans losing 23 to 12 democratic senators this term. If there is no election dems regain the executive and the senate.
ghthor 6y ago
Like how the MSM spent 3 years trying to convince the public that the 2016 election wasn't legitimate?
- deleted 6y ago
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- quickthrowman 6y ago