During Calls for Increased Mail-in Voting, New U.S. Postmaster General Decreases Post Office Activity

[Vanoi]

They're not.

https://www.cnet.com/how-to/mail-in-...he-difference/

They are.

Every US state allows mail-in, absentee voting, but typically only under certain circumstances. For example, in the past, many states only allowed you to get an absentee ballot if you were deployed with the US armed forces, were going to be out of town on Election Day or were ill.

Amid the pandemic, however, at least 35 states have changed their mail-in absentee voting policies, allowing all voters to apply for an absentee ballot to cut down on the risk of spreading the virus. Some states are calling the expanded criteria for absentee voting "no-excuse absentee voting," a term that indicates you don't need to explain why you want an absentee ballot as you have in the past -- but you'll still need to fill out an application and request one, either online or through mail.

[Sir Adrian]

No they're not. Absentee ballots are printed in extremely limited number, they usually have special identifying features and have to be personally requested. Mail by voting is not requested.

Absentee ballots put 0 strain on the postal system and there is not incentive to falsify such as small number of ballots. Mail voting is guaranteed to be defrauded by the democratic party in order to get Kamala elected. The democrats already promised he people who control the ballots that if they win said people will not get their budget cut.

[Vanoi]

No they're not. Absentee ballots are printed in extremely limited number, they usually have special identifying features and have to be personally requested. Mail by voting is not requested.

Not according to my source you just ignored. Do you have a source that absentee ballots are limited in number, have special identifying features as you claimed?

Absentee ballots put 0 strain on the postal system and there is not incentive to falsify such as small number of ballots. Mail voting is guaranteed to be defrauded by the democratic party in order to get Kamala elected. The democrats already promised he people who control the ballots that if they win said people will not get their budget cut.

Do you have any evidence indicating the Democratic Party will defraud absentee ballots to win the election by fraud?

[Infidel144]

Since absentee ballots (as has been done in the past)) and mail in voting (as currently proposed or discussed) are the "exact same thing", then there should be no problem everyone who wants to vote following the procedures for absentee voting and doing the election that way. No more need to talk about this whole 'mail in voting' thing or doing anything related to it. Just follow the absentee ballot procedures as already set up.
Glad thats all fixed.

[Vanoi]

Since absentee ballots (as has been done in the past)) and mail in voting (as currently proposed or discussed) are the "exact same thing", then there should be no problem everyone who wants to vote following the procedures for absentee voting and doing the election that way. No more need to talk about this whole 'mail in voting' thing or doing anything related to it. Just follow the absentee ballot procedures as already set up.
Glad thats all fixed.

Thats what you have to do now. Even in states that expanded absentee voting. With the exception of Delaware, California, and Illinois, you are still going to have to request an absentee ballot and fill out an application for one.

[Infidel144]

If what you say is correct, then no problem with states following that procedure.
Although I vote absentee (done so for a couple decades) and I have had to request ballots. Is CA trying to change that?

[Vanoi]

If what you say is correct, then no problem with states following that procedure.
Although I vote absentee (done so for a couple decades) and I have had to request ballots. Is CA trying to change that?

California and the other states i mentioned all have decided to send out absentee ballots to all eligible registered voters without them requesting a ballot or filling out an application.

[Gaidin]

Maryland literally sent the primary ballot to everyone, no questions asked. Since I am unaffiliated with a party there was only one primary printed on my ballot.

[pacifism]

According to FiveThirtyEight's "How to vote in 2020" project, about ten states automatically mail ballots to voters, including the five states that already vote by mail as a default. An additional dozen or so automatically mail absentee ballot application forms. Who would've thought a Democratic leaning state like New York would have so little mail-in voting, or a GOP state like Utah have so much?

As it stands, California will automatically mail a ballot to voters, and Maryland will mail no-excuse-needed absentee ballot applications for the election. My state is one of the five that already does vote by mail, and I gotta rep it. It's just so much easier to vote and do research in your own time from home.

Most republicans bought into the Russian "I'm not wearing a muzzle", "the virus isn't so bad" and "masks don't do anything" propaganda shtick and they will go out and vote. The people that stay at home will mostly be democrats or neutrals who are not really interested in the vote.

What the government could and should do is scatter the vote over multiple days, for example day one people born in January - March can go and vote, day two April - June, etc with a final day for everyone who did not get to vote on their day. This would lower the risk by 75%.

As it stands voting by mail is going to be a disaster. Besides being extremely easy to defraud, the system itself will probably not work very well on account of it being the first time on a scale like this and many USPS offices being closed or damaged due to the protests and you will definitely hear a lot of and moaning for the next 4 years, regardless if Trump or Kamala Harris becomes president.

Well, I do agree that the Democrats made a mistake in defending protests in particular during the pandemic.

In previous elections, there was no evidence voting by mail gives one party an advantage. If throwing COVID into the mix this time around is going to change that, I consider that to be a fairly substantial criticism of the federal government and the president's attitude towards this pandemic. I have not seen anything to suggest that mail-in voting is problematic, several states have most votes done by mail for awhile, it's not that much more susceptible to voter fraud than in-person. But surely there's a way to work on improving mail-in voting with what time we still have, and not disincentivizing it and delegitimatizing it so strongly? Because that's my problem here: attacking the legitimacy of mail-in voting to improve electoral odds instead of strengthening it to improve the democratic process.

As for your proposal of spacing out the election, that may not be constitutional. Article II, Section 1 says that Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States. You could argue that voting for electors can be spaced out, but that goes against the historical precedent of electors being a formality who represent the majority vote of their state. It would be an interesting legal case either way, but your suggestion may not be allowed. Congressional elections could be spaced out, but that's determined by state or federal legislatures (Article I, Section 4).

The post office is in competition with private delivery services, like Amazon, right? is this Trump hurting the public utility to benefit Bezos and buy his support? Most of the tech boys have been lining up behind the Democrats. That'd be a huge coup, Bezos has so much data on so many people he could go along way to offsetting the Zucc etc.

Last time Facebook played fairly neutral allowing the ol' Russian trolls (and lets be frank good old fashioned US trolls too) to stink up the election, so they helped Trump indirectly, but poor old Zuckerberg got hauled in for a grilling for that. I would guess Trump will get less help from idiot trolls this time around.

In previous years, the president's criticisms of the Post Office were centered around the idea that they were getting ripped off by Amazon. As a public service, USPS doesn't necessarily need to be profitable per se, and it's a bit up in the air how much Amazon and the USPS help each other. Additional volume is welcome for the Postal Service, but I don't think the negotiated shipping rates are publicly available. Jeff Bezos has been one of those "please stop me from destroying the environment, people" kind of billionaires anyway. He supported a quite a few Washington state Democrats and their initiatives over the years, and the president has accused him of avoiding taxes, which is almost as rich as Bezos himself.

To be honest, it really doesn't look it an attempt at courting Amazon and private competitors. Maybe it could have been two years ago, but not anymore.

I'd like to read about those episodes. Please post the links. I see fake news stories all the time in the NYT so this should be good.

Just for the record, I was thinking of Breitbart News and not some other site. I wasn’t mistaken. Anyway, here it goes:

For my claim about white nationalists: back in 2015, the tech editor for Breitbart wrote a column defining the alt-right by soliciting white nationalists and an actual monarchist for details they wanted him to include. “I think you’ll like what I’m cooking up,” he wrote to an openly white nationalist Henry Saucier. In a bizarre twist, the reporter is apparently Jewish man, married to a black man, and yet he seems to have a rather friendly rapport with white nationalists. At a certain point, even journalists covering racists have to be a little more anti-racist than that. The site has steadily positioned itself around the alt-right for awhile now.

For conspiracy theories, Roger Stone co-writes books of conspiracy theories against the Clintons in his free time (pun intended, of course). One conspiracy theory was that a Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin had terrorist connections, which Breitbart News ran.

In 2017, Breitbart News was the vehicle from a deep-state conspiracy theorist radio talk show to the President’s own social media account that the Obama administration wiretapped Trump’s phones. Whatever the DoJ actually did to the Trump campaign, tapping Trump's phones was not one of them.

I will admit that they do fewer conspiracies than I thought they did, my mistake there. They usually just write false or misleading pieces, going as far back as that on ACORN video from when the founder was still alive. It’s gotten worse in the past several years, such as Muslim mobs in Germany on New Year’s Day, Hillary Clinton’s health (1 and 2), illegal immigrants, and now COVID. Rolling Stone suggested that Breitbart acts as a kind of somewhat respectable front for a hub of truly wild hard-right people according to this article. You don't have to believe it 100%, but the trail from Breitbart News to InfoWars and its clones seems to really be there.

On a more sentimental note, it is my understanding that you do not really trust most standard or mainstream media outlets for reliable news. Skepticism is a good thing, but I would like to suggest that deciding something is fake news or not due to its publisher and not the quality of evidence behind the claims is not the way to do this. Skepticism is about reserving judgment, not being dismissive. Even the best evidence can be used and delivered in a way that promotes a bias. But being subjective or having a bias doesn’t make someone wrong. You and I both have biases. I think that the solution is to take information from a wide variety of sources and weigh the evidence to see what the facts are and what the opinions are, not shooting down information because it's from people with different opinions than you.

When I read websites like Breitbart News and take out the right-wing slant, I personally find that there is often not much in the way of actual news left. Personally. That doesn’t mean that they’re never right, but the information they provide is filtered and incomplete. This can be true for a lot of individual news outlets. Getting news from just one or a handful of sources means that you can miss out on other viewpoints, certain data, or lines of reasoning on your way towards finding out the truth of a matter. You would also have to be really relying on the reputation of just a few organizations -- a few writerts, really -- to give good and balanced reporting. That's something I'm skeptical of. So, for me, if it turned out that the New York Times or something was actually a bunch of bupkis, my world would not come crashing down because I try to draw from a variety of sites for information.

Over the years I've read several stories about lazy postal workers dumping the mail they were supposed to deliver in their homes and garages. One of those was right in my own neighborhood. I guess I'm supposed to ignore the possibility that some highly motivated democrat postal employee will dump my ballot because my neighborhood has a lot of R's in it.

And, by the way, the Dems claiming that Social Security recipients won't get their checks if the postal budget is reduced is complete fantasy. I'm retired and have been receiving benefits for years and I've never recieved a check through the mail. Do the Dems really believe their voters haven't heard of direct deposit?

Okay... it's not literally impossible for that to happen somewhere, but everywhere? At the end of the day, people who do that sort of thing tend to get caught, like that guy in your neighborhood. The question that I'm raising when I started this thread is that about thirty states require mail-in and absentee ballots to be received by election officials on election day. How much trust can we have that all our votes will be counted if the leaders of the Post Office are intentionally slowing down operations? In a worst case scenario, that could actually amount to affecting millions of people, and there is no one that could ever be caught doing something wrong because it was all legal. The possibility is there.

Out of everything I've heard Democrats complain about over the years, all the democratic norms and values that the president supposedly violates, this one seems to be the most substantial, pervasive, and credible to me.

[irontaino]

Trump wants to send police and volunteers to polling stations to "monitor voter fraud".

He then pivoted to in-person voting, asking whether Mr Trump would have “poll watchers” to check that voters have been identified and to ensure every ballot is “a real vote from a real American”.

“We’re gonna have everything,” Mr Trump answered. “We’re gonna have sheriffs, and we’re gonna have law enforcement, and we’re going to have US attorneys, and we’re going to have everybody, and attorney generals – but it’s very hard!”

Nothing suspicious here at all.

[Heathen Hammer]

Trump wants to send police and volunteers to polling stations to "monitor voter fraud".



Nothing suspicious here at all.

Why is monitoring elections for fraud a bad thing according to Democrat supporters?

[Infidel144]

Poll watchers are standard (the various states have different rules for who can be a poll watcher), but law enforcement acting as such would probably run afoul of:
18 U.S. Code § 592.Troops at polls
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/592

Although why this was put in the post office thread rather than election thread is an open question.

[Coughdrop addict]

Trump wants to send police and volunteers to polling stations to "monitor voter fraud".



Nothing suspicious here at all.

In other words, some of his very fine people will be sent to polling places to intimidate or outright attack anyone who they think isn't going to vote for him.

[Gaidin]

In other words, some of his very fine people will be sent to polling places to intimidate or outright attack anyone who they think isn't going to vote for him.

Both parties have poll watchers every election, though every state has their own standard rules. Typically things like, they must be residents of the district, or the county. Something like that.

Using police, national guard, or military when the US is not under attack would be...what's the word? Illegal? That's right. It would be illegal. The people that order it and the people that do it would be federally screwed.

[Heathen Hammer]

Except that what Trump suggested is not illegal. It is quite telling however, that elections being monitored for fraud is viewed as bad thing by Democrats.

[Gaidin]

Let me know when we get invaded.

[Pontifex Maximus]

Trump wants to send police and volunteers to polling stations to "monitor voter fraud".



Nothing suspicious here at all.

Major postal workers union endorses Biden. Nothing suspicious here at all.
https://apnews.com/2eb0459bf4cd01838a6e75cc4ca5cece

[irontaino]

Major postal workers union endorses Biden. Nothing suspicious here at all.
https://apnews.com/2eb0459bf4cd01838a6e75cc4ca5cece

Maybe it has something to do with the current president trying to gut the postal service?

[Coughdrop addict]

Maybe it has something to do with the current president trying to gut the postal service?

That's crazy talk. It's obviously Soros using the superpowers he got from eating babies in the pizza dungeon telepathically controlling their minds from his evil fortress in the Mars child slavery colonies as part of his plot to harm poor, oppressed Putin. Wake up sheeple!

[Pontifex Maximus]

Maybe it has something to do with the current president trying to gut the postal service?

What has Trump done to gut the postal service? And you see no issues whatsoever with that union endorsing Biden while the demkcrats simultaneoulsy call for universal mail in voting? That doesn't strike you as potentially problematic at all?