6 ms·

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

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.
zjs 6y ago
I'm sure a lot has changed since I worked in a mailroom ~15 years ago, but I think there's at least two important factors here: 1. Bulk mail is slow. First class mail takes a few days to be delivered. Bulk mail may take a couple weeks. 2. Bulk mail must be sorted and grouped. Depending on volume, you're sorting by either zip or zip+4. This is easy to do when you can just sort your mail merge file so that you print in the sorted order. For presorted mail, sorting machines aren't needed. Basically, completed ballots are going to be flowing in the direction the mail system isn't optimized for. I'm sure they'll all get there eventually, but ensuring they all arrive at the right place in time to be counted is the hard part.
- shrubble 6y ago
  The cheapest rate is 'everyone gets one' which requires no sorting. The second cheapest rate is carrier route sorting, where you sort by zip+4 and also put it in the exact order the carrier takes on that route to deliver mail. Also does not require mail sorting.
- gremlinsinc 6y ago
  Maybe we make the Post Office ALSO the Office of Elections and run them nationally or in partnership w/ locals. You can vote in person at an post office for 30 days before. No need for polling locations, no need for staffing vulnerable elderly people. Just go into a post office and vote. Get a receipt showing your vote, that is verifiable online with the receipt#. Say, any postal worker can validate a vote. They don't look at your vote, they only look at your information and validate it against your voting record via an app, then you vote, hand it back to them and they notarize the envelope or put a seal on it saying it's valid. Once that happens there's no question to validity of ballots. No ballots tossed. Any mail carrier can do this, so elderly home-ridden folks could request a mail carrier take their vote at home.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Maybe we make the Post Office ALSO the Office of Elections and run them nationally or in partnership w/ locals. Aside from the Constitutional issues that raises, the Post Office was disbanded almost 50 years ago and replaced with a government-owned self-financed corporation, the Postal Service. So, first, we'd have to re-establish the Post Office.
devchix 6y ago
> How can one extra pieceof mail for the entire year cause an "unprecedented" volume? Yeah I don't understand it either. McDonald's sell 2 billion burgers a year but when I ordered one million at the drive-thru it caused their system to crash. (Not me, somebody said this on Twitter first.)
- savanaly 6y ago
  I don't follow. Is that intended to reveal a flaw in the argument or is just a joke?

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.

zjs 6y ago

I'm sure a lot has changed since I worked in a mailroom ~15 years ago, but I think there's at least two important factors here: 1. Bulk mail is slow. First class mail takes a few days to be delivered. Bulk mail may take a couple weeks. 2. Bulk mail must be sorted and grouped. Depending on volume, you're sorting by either zip or zip+4. This is easy to do when you can just sort your mail merge file so that you print in the sorted order. For presorted mail, sorting machines aren't needed. Basically, completed ballots are going to be flowing in the direction the mail system isn't optimized for. I'm sure they'll all get there eventually, but ensuring they all arrive at the right place in time to be counted is the hard part.

shrubble 6y ago
The cheapest rate is 'everyone gets one' which requires no sorting. The second cheapest rate is carrier route sorting, where you sort by zip+4 and also put it in the exact order the carrier takes on that route to deliver mail. Also does not require mail sorting.
gremlinsinc 6y ago
Maybe we make the Post Office ALSO the Office of Elections and run them nationally or in partnership w/ locals. You can vote in person at an post office for 30 days before. No need for polling locations, no need for staffing vulnerable elderly people. Just go into a post office and vote. Get a receipt showing your vote, that is verifiable online with the receipt#. Say, any postal worker can validate a vote. They don't look at your vote, they only look at your information and validate it against your voting record via an app, then you vote, hand it back to them and they notarize the envelope or put a seal on it saying it's valid. Once that happens there's no question to validity of ballots. No ballots tossed. Any mail carrier can do this, so elderly home-ridden folks could request a mail carrier take their vote at home.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Maybe we make the Post Office ALSO the Office of Elections and run them nationally or in partnership w/ locals. Aside from the Constitutional issues that raises, the Post Office was disbanded almost 50 years ago and replaced with a government-owned self-financed corporation, the Postal Service. So, first, we'd have to re-establish the Post Office.

devchix 6y ago

> How can one extra pieceof mail for the entire year cause an "unprecedented" volume? Yeah I don't understand it either. McDonald's sell 2 billion burgers a year but when I ordered one million at the drive-thru it caused their system to crash. (Not me, somebody said this on Twitter first.)

savanaly 6y ago
I don't follow. Is that intended to reveal a flaw in the argument or is just a joke?