Ballot Rejections Have Soared in Rural Counties as USPS Reduces Mail Service

ck2

this is an anchor link to their zip-code check near middle of page: * https://www.propublica.org/article/mail-ballot-delays-postal...

hedora

It's almost like the republicans would be better off if they paid attention to their constitutional duties instead of just burning things down. This will clearly hurt them in statewide elections, but I wonder how it plays out in local rural elections. I can imagine the rejected ballots leaning more blue than average in heavily red areas. I can also imagine the opposite: Older folks have less mobility on average, and are probably more likely to mail the ballots in. The Propublica article doesn't say anything about this, but I imagine some election officials track it. Their ID requirements in Ohio blew back a similar way a few years ago. They made it extremely hard to vote without a driver's license, thinking it'd hit college kids, but it mostly hit retirees that no longer drive.

kotaKat

Yep. Welcome to "regional transportation optimization". Every single day is painful being in an RTO territory for the post office. https://www.savethepostoffice.com/rto-n2024-1/ It's so frustrating. If I want to mail something out, it sits for over a day in the local post office. Even Priority Mail Express can no longer get something out locally overnight. If I need overnight service, I have to drive a significant distance to get to a UPS station to get something into the network. If something mis-sorts to the wrong post office, it sits for over a day at that remote post office before it can re-enter the stream. I have had more and more late and missorted packages that compound the late deliveries and all I want to do is cry that I can't get the mail anymore in a reasonable fashion.

hyperhello

Of course a few rural votes will be rejected, but rest assured plenty more of the urban votes will be rejected too, for a net gain of many rural votes!

exabrial

There'd be enough to do that if the USPS wasn't busy burning thousands of tons of Diesel fuel to haul Verizon and Citi card advertisements to everyone else.

gamblor956

10 years ago, mail service used to be great. Than Trump brought in the idiot from FedEx who "upgraded" the mail service. Even though the volume of mail has dropped 50%, the USPS now struggles to properly process the remaining mail on a timely basis. Local deliveries used to be overnight; now they take up to a week. Transnational deliveries can take months. I hope the primary effect of this will be that millions of MAGA votes go uncounted this year and in 2028, because they're the ones that voted for this in the first place.

hagbard_c

All this ballot-this and ballot-that is so easily solved if only those who oppose showing ID would drop their objections. Here's how it works: 1: show up at polling location, either on voting day or within the early voting period. 2: show ID to poll worker who verifies it and hands over the ballots for the elections in which you have the right to vote 3: fill in the ballots, put them in the envelope(s) and hand these over to a poll worker 4: poll worker checks again whether you have voting rights for the specific elections and drops the envelopes into the correct voting urns Done. No postal service involved. You can vote at any (early) voting location for national elections, for local ones you'll need to go to a local voting location where the required ballots are available. Early voting can start a few weeks before election day so nearly everyone should have the possibility to set aside half an hour to an hour to do their civic duty. That leaves those who really can't make it to the polls. For these people there can be a verified postal ballot system, i.e. they get one sent home on request, fill it out and send it back in the required envelopes. Voting by mail always adds risks but since it would only be needed for a small fraction of the voters that risk is manageable. Mail-in votes need to be counted on election day so they need to be in the mail about a week before election day. Why you ask? Because the fraud risk of mail-in ballots makes it all too easy to use them to add enough votes to push a close race towards a specific candidate. Count them early on election day and publish the results, these need to be final results, before the rest of the votes are counted. There's plenty of countries where votes are counted this way, this is not rocket science. I have voting rights in 2 different countries in northern and western Europe, both use something resembling this scheme. Everyone shows his or her ID either to get the ballots or to have them deposited in the voting urns, this has never been contested and the mere thought of voting without ID is so clearly outrageously silly that nobody brings it up. All the arguments against showing ID have been proven to be specious at best, you need ID to do just about anything related to the government so insisting on voting without it only serves to undermine trust in elections.