Sorry Trump haters, you can’t blame him for the problems with the U.S. Postal Service. They have been intentionally disrupting postal service since at least the Nixon era.
In 1969 the powers that be at the Postal Service decided to “no longer strive for overnight delivery and to keep it a secret from Congress and the public,” according to the Washington Post. At that time they also considered cutting costs by “educating” Americans not to expect prompt service. In 1989 that guaranteed overnight first-class delivery was reduced from a 100-150 miles radius to only 50 miles or less.
In 1993, the Postal Service actually created a task force to figure out a way to make a better profit by shifting over-night delivery to two-day delivery. This little scam, called “Delivery First,” simply meant that carriers would deliver the mail they had on hand first and then sort the day’s incoming mail later, adding at least an additional day to delivery times.
In 2000, the Postal Service once again quietly slashed delivery targets in much of the nation for first-class mail going beyond local areas, in violation of federal law that required the “highest consideration” to speedy mail delivery, according to a 2006 Post Regulatory Commission report.
In 2015, the Postal Service effectively eliminated overnight mail delivery even for local mail in much of the nation. Under their new standards, mail was considered on time even if it took 4 to 5 days to arrive. Postal patrons in Roanoke, Virginia, were skewered because local mail processing was shifted to Greensboro, N.C., which actually doubled the time necessary for cross-town mail delivery. In other words, if a Roanoke business or citizen mailed a letter to someone in Roanoke, it was taken to Greensboro, NC, a 212 mile round trip, to be sorted before coming all the way back to Roanoke, Virginia, to be sorted by the carrier and then delivered.
This little deal, according to Postal Management, would save them almost a billion dollars but guess what – they barely realized 10% of that figure which meant they had to “borrow” taxpayer money to cover a $50 billion loss in prior years just so they could continue to lose money in 2016.
The Postal Service has a monopoly over letter delivery, with a limited exemption for urgent, courier-delivered letters costing more than $3. This monopoly, which dates back to the 1840s, has become more indefensible with each passing decade. After a half-century of service cutbacks, why continue nationalizing the transport of small envelopes? Ending the postal monopoly could spur the same explosion in options for letter delivery that Uber and Lyft have created for transit.
They only get away with scorning their customers because it is effectively a federal crime to provide better mail service than the government. So even if Congress passes a $100 billion bailout for the postal service, nothing will change.
To even suggest that this organization could handle the deluge of mailed ballots in November is but a left-wing delusion. Even the Postal Service agrees, having recently sent letters to numerous states warning that mail-in ballots may not be delivered on time.
In New York City, officials struggled for six weeks to count mail-in ballots just from the June primary. Up to 20% of ballots “were declared invalid” before even being opened, based on lack of signatures and missing postmarks. It was what The New York Daily News labeled a “dumpster fire” while a New York Times headline described it as “the November nightmare.”
And it’s not just in New York. In Wisconsin more than 20,000 primary ballots were thrown out and in Virginia, almost 6% were rejected because they arrived late. In Nevada almost a quarter million ballots that were sent out were returned as undeliverable. A City Council election in Paterson, NJ was invalided by a judge due to rampant mail-in voter fraud.
Recorded ballot counts in 72% of Wayne County Detroit absentee voting precincts didn’t match the number of ballots cast. According to an article in Red/Right Daily, Bob Cushman, who was appointed as a “poll challenger” by the Michigan Republican Party and was present while ballots were being counted. Cushman said several counting tables “had opened ballots with no poll book” to check whether the individual was authorized to cast that ballot. In another instance he noticed “pages being inserted into several poll books.”
Naturally, rather than admit that mail-in voting isn’t going to work, Democratic activists are calling for changes to state laws to permit the counting of ballots that arrive late, and for abolishing standards to assure the integrity of the individual ballot. Such changes are practically guaranteed to produce far more confusion, delays, fraud, and distrust for election results.
If you value our election process and if you want your vote to count – vote in person.
You can read Mail Slowdowns Started 50 Years Before Trump, by James Bovard, AIER, at the link provided. Detroit Ballot Disaster! ‘So Inaccurate We Can’t Even Attempt to Make Right’, Red/Right Daily
