Major mail delivery delays raise concerns about voting in the 2024 elections

Residents and businesses nationwide have been reporting slowdowns in mail and package delivery by the U.S. Postal Service, raising concerns that mail-in ballots could be affected in the upcoming election.

In Virginia, hundreds of veterans had their colon cancer screening tests invalidated after the results took months to arrive by mail. An Atlanta college student missed an academic trip to Ghana when their passport with two-day shipping took a month to show up. A bride in Texas had to rent a dress for her wedding after hers spent weeks stuck in a Houston postal facility.

Across the country, residents and businesses have been reporting widespread slowdowns in mail and package delivery by the U.S. Postal Service. The delays have become so persistent that members of Congress have gotten involved, urging the Postal Service to drastically correct course and raising concern about what impact the disruptions could have on mail-in ballots in the upcoming election.

The delays appear to largely stem from a new system the Postal Service began rolling out last fall that will eventually funnel all the nation’s letters and packages through a consolidated network of 60 regional distribution centers — similar to the airlines’ hub-and-spoke model. The change is part of a wider $40 billion, 10-year overhaul of the network that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has said will reduce costs, improve reliability and make the Postal Service more competitive. But in some instances, the plan has done the opposite, according to the Office of the Inspector General for the Postal Service, members of Congress and Postal Service advocacy groups.

scytale,

The first step to improve the system is to fire DeJoy.

deweydecibel,

They can’t. They would have if they could.

ptz, (edited )
@ptz@dubvee.org avatar

I think how they meant to end that sentence was “out of a cannon and into the sun”

BolexForSoup,
BolexForSoup avatar

Which canon? SW cinema or EU?

Aurenkin,

Will nobody rid me of this troublesome postmaster?

pdxfed,

Smeerensburg? How hard could it be?

grue,

No, that’s not true. Biden has appointed enough people to the postal board now that they could’ve had an anti-DeJoy majority if that’s what Biden were selecting for, but it clearly wasn’t (for some unfathomable reason).

BigDaddySlim,
@BigDaddySlim@lemmy.world avatar

Election mail is supposed to be handled locally, especially when it gets closer to the election. We separate the ballots and bypass the sorting facilities and bring them to the local town hall/voting location. This was the usual process for the last 2 offices and presidential elections I worked through for this very reason, especially when DeJoy shut down sorting machines.

The delays are still a concern for many reasons, but as long as local post offices handle ballot delivery locally it would help minimize late ballots.

That being said, what do I know? I’m just a lowly cog in the machine.

ForestOrca,
ForestOrca avatar

Thank you O' Cog for your toothy, spinny perspective!

commandar, (edited )

The delays are still a concern for many reasons, but as long as local post offices handle ballot delivery locally it would help minimize late ballots.

There’s the rub, though: the model DeJoy is moving to is trying to remove mail carriers from thousands of local post offices. The plan is to funnel everything through centralized regional sort centers and have all routes start/end there. Even if the local post office set ballots to the side, they’d still end up flowing back through the sort center because, under the plan, many post offices will essentially be the equivalent of a UPS or FedEx retail location.

grue,

Did you forget about the fact that half the point of absentee ballots is for folks to vote when they’re away (e.g. deployed in the military, at college, etc.) and can’t get back to their precinct vote? That mail is definitely not supposed to be getting handled locally!

BigDaddySlim,
@BigDaddySlim@lemmy.world avatar

Correct, which is why handling local ballots locally helps lower volume at the sorting facilities and hopefully allowing them to get to their destination town on time.

dan1101,

The beginning of crappy unreliable service in my area happened years before DeJoy. It was when they closed down a ~5 year old local processing facility and started sending all the mail to a regional facility 60 miles away.

henfredemars,

Well, yes. It’s being actively sabotaged on purpose because it’s one of the few social services we have that actually kind of works, and you get two birds of one stone because it hurts mail voting.

It’s killing itself as intended. Probably so someone can point and say look we should have this privatized.

BossDj, (edited )

Some process information:

Postal Service is run by a board of members who are recommended by the president and voted into place by Congress.

Board members serve 7 years terms

The board chooses a Postmaster General and Deputy, who have unlimited terms and are also voting members on the board. This would be the guy who we are all angry at

The board must be comprised of a split of Democrats and Republicans (can have one more Democrat than Republican for example) The board cannot have more than 5 members from the same political party

Some more political stuff: Laws by Congress can set directives for the board. Since our Congress has been split for all of Biden’s presidency, desire stuff hasn’t gotten done.

A lame duck Congress pre-Obama attached stamp prices to inflation, forced USPS to pre fund worker wages and benefits, shortened delivery to six days. Obama made no attempt to fix this in the short time he had a same party Congress.

Biden did sign a law that removed the “pre financing” of postal worker retirement funds, barred the board from lowering delivery service days below 6, and introduced mandatory service quality reporting to President and Congress, which is why we’re getting this information. However, this had to be a bipartisan bill in order to pass, so it also did things to help Republicans.

Biden has replaced outgoing board members with people who outwardly seemed interested in improving the service and were strong vote by mail advocates.

Biden DID nominate a Republican, but remember it has to remain balanced. *edit – There are 3 Democrats on the board already. All three nominated by Biden. That means the two remaining spots can be Democrats. He could have chosen an independent instead of a Republican. However, the Republican he chose also worked with Amtrak under Obama.

There are two open seats Biden is dragging his feet on, maybe to extend their limits well into the next presidencies?

The current chairman of the board ends his term this December.

Big opinion: Stop blaming presidents for stuff. Vote for Congress is way more important.

edit: less bias (I had blamed Republicans for stuff that Democrats had also voted yes) & spelling correction edit again: corrections by @SeaJ

SeaJ,

The board must be comprised of a split of Democrats and Republicans (can have one more Democrat than Republican for example)

This is incorrect. No more than five governors can be from the same party. Two of the governors are independent. Biden nominated three Democrats, one independent, and one Republican. The Republican governor was not necessary since having a Democrat instead would mean there would only be four governors that would be Democrats. He would then still be able to nominate another Democrat.

Burn_The_Right,

Why is DeJoy, a notorious Trump syncophant, permitted to be head of the USPS? Can he not be replaced? He is a threat to our democracy.

SeaJ,

Biden has had the capacity to replace him for at least a year now.

Burn_The_Right,

Between Garland and DeJoy, I hope we are paying attention to what neo-liberals think progress looks like. We need to be aggressively supporting young progressives in the Democratic party as much as possible.

tacosplease,

Will that pull in enough swing voters though? I’d love Liz or Bernie to be running the show, but I don’t trust America’s shitty electorate to sufficiently turn out for someone like that.

From my perspective, Biden ran as a somewhat conservative Democrat and then proceeded to pass some fairly progressive stuff despite the current political environment.

IMO we’re doing about as well as we can do considering the broad range of political ideologies that all have to fit under the “not a conservative” umbrella before there are enough voters to outnumber conservatives + the electoral collage.

tacosplease,

Not trying to say this isn’t true, but do you have a source for this info?

I know they needed to appoint new board members because that’s who votes for DeJoy’s position. They were able to replace a couple conservatives but one of the board members we thought was a progressive started blocking attempts to remove DeJoy.

At least that’s how I remember it. That was several months ago if not longer though. Would love for someone to correct whatever I got wrong and update us with anything that may have happened since then.

SeaJ,

The last person he nominated was a Republican back in May 2022. He was not required to nominate a Republican. The board can only have a maximum of five governors from the same party. Currently there are three Democrats, three Republicans, and one independent and also two vacant spots. So there could easily be two more Democrats. If the last person he nominated was a Democrat, that would mean four Democrats, two Republicans, and one independent which means it would not matter if that independent person always sided with Republicans.

So he essentially had the power to get DeJoy removed for nearly the last two years.

The source for the info is Wikipedia which lists the when the terms began for each governor.

en.wikipedia.org/…/Board_of_Governors_of_the_Unit…

homesweethomeMrL,

If you know, you know (LWT on USPS)

andrewta,

I know people don’t like to hear this but if humanly possible take the voting day off from work, ask for it as soon as possible. Then vote in person. I know it’s not a perfect answer but if we are looking at a mailing issue for voting then do everything possible to vote in person. Get there when the doors open. That way no one can claim some bullshit about the mail in ballot wasn’t there in time.

If humanly possible bring an id so things go faster. Register in advance.

ForestOrca,
ForestOrca avatar

I prefer to vote early, by dropping my completed ballot off at the appropriate location.

snooggums,
@snooggums@midwest.social avatar

I know people don’t like to hear this but if humanly possible take the voting day off from work, ask for it as soon as possible.

The problem is that a lot of people can’t do that. It also shouldn’t be necessary to take a whole day off work when mail in voting and other options are proven to work and the only reason for long lines and the inability to easily vote is Republican voter suppression.

frickineh,

Do other places with mail in voting not have ballot drop boxes? I live in CO and a lot of people don’t even put their ballots in the mail because there are boxes at a lot of public buildings that are picked up directly by the county every day (or more often). Then again, we actually want people to vote and I know that’s not the case in plenty of states.

EdibleFriend,
@EdibleFriend@lemmy.world avatar

Did they ever rebuild those machines he had torn down before the last election?

snooggums,
@snooggums@midwest.social avatar

No, he is converting the post office into the shitty centralized mega sorting approach like Amazon and other large shipping systems that is technically efficient overall but degrades consistency nationwide. The decentralized post office approach is how they were consistently fast even in rural areas or remote locations.

The post office was set up to serve everyone. The current changes will serve some people better at the expense of others. The old setup was the better setup.

athos77,

Fucker DeJoy.

800XL,

Is this the same Postmaster that human scrotum Donald Trump appointed? The same one that did away with all those sorting machines so that mail-in-ballots woule be invalid?

catloaf,

Yes.

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