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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 am

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.

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.