I’m in California, and have been doing vote-by-mail for years. This year I’m not going to mail it back, but go to an official drop-off place. Googling says my town’s drop-off place is inside our town’s city hall. And if even that feels dicey to me, I’ll see which is an even more secure place - maybe the office of the registrar of voters of my county?
I’m likely taking this speculation, about the unknowable, too seriously, but disadvantages of voting in person include:
– Voting machine could malfunction
– While you vote, someone standing in line behind you, who wants to vote as you did, will give up
– You might be too ill on election day to vote, or suddenly called out of town for a family emergency
Last minute postal voting should be avoided. But, beyond that, I find zero evidence that careful postal, drop box, or in-person voting is superior.
This is just the beginning. Wait until election Day when the federal thugs in riot gear start tear gassing people outside your voting place, saying someone threw something and they had to arrest a bunch of people because “Antifa” was there.
But what’s going to stop the president from tapping his political lackey on the shoulder and telling him to temporarily close post offices for “maintenance.”
Whether this actually happens or not, I don’t know. I kinda doubt he’d be quite so blatant, but there’s already a clear and obvious effort to undermine the postal system for the purposes of disrupting voting by mail, so it really can’t be ruled out as a possibility.
Who’s going to stop him? How?
We’re seeing the consequences of giving a single office so much power.
Most of my life I’ve wondered why we need mail delivery nearly every day. Why not deliver mail every Wednesday and Sunday? Has anyone considered the effects of this kind of a change?
Where do you find enough people who are willing to work two days a week and handle the size of the mail load they would have to deal with? Just the junk mail I get would overwhelm my mailbox if it was only twice a week.
Since I moved into my current house, I’ve wondered why I’ve got a mailbox next to my door, rather than at the street.
I’d have no problem walking down my driveway if it meant helping keep the USPS solvent. Seems antiquated and inefficient to have the mail carrier actually have to walk door to door with the mail.
I’d have everyone converted to mailboxes like we have, big rural boxes. Delivery days would require a ton of man-hours, but there’d be a gain in efficiency. There’d likely be an increase in postage, and that would encourage more businesses to use other forms of advertising/billing/etc.
What about apartment buildings or mobile home parks with the banks of boxes? Most won’t have the room for dozens or even hundreds of large boxes. Plus, newer neighborhoods have clusterboxes which were specifically intended to improve delivery efficiency.
In some of the primaries (Georgia, DC, maybe others), there were reports of ballots mailed in plenty of time, like a week or so before the election, and which did not get to the Elections Office in time. And that was before the Trump’s postal stooge started cutting back on the service.
Not available in all states.
More likely he’d use COVID as the excuse, but what specific one he uses is immaterial. And he’s not very subtle about things; it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if he admits to closing post offices to help his reelection.
We’ve been seeing that for some time now, but that’s a topic that deserves a thread of its own.
No they won’t.
The idea that Republicans will ever say anything to this President more forceful than “please, sir, might I have some more?” has left the building. They’ve shown time and time again that their only underlying principle is absolute fealty to his authority (not authority in general, but Trump’s authority specifically.)
They’re all for this.
Drop off your ballot.
the Ohio Sec’y of state has nixed drop-boxes. Republicans in Pa are suing to stop their use. I kind of expect trump’s goon squads (either of the official or unofficial variety) to “confiscate” such boxes because reasons.
I think you all are forgetting the court system. Especially if it’s as blatant as Trump tends to be, federal judges and the Supreme Court have generally shown that they are not Trump lackeys, especially for something like this. It’s a pretty fast and pretty simple thing to say that ballots have to be counted, in the places where the postmark counts, that arrive up to a week after the normal deadline, or whatever timeframe is reasonable.
I’m not saying Trump won’t try, and I’m not saying to mail your ballot if you can drop it off, but I think the level of scare mongering is a bit high. Get ballots in early, drop them off, take extra care if you are in a swing state in a blue district. But you don’t need to be panicking over it in August. And you should probably not opt for in person voting instead, since that can have its own set of shenanigans.
Oh yeah, that pissed me off.
“What I decided to do rather than wait for continued legal analysis, was to move forward and say we’re not going to allow additional drop boxes for this election,” LaRose said.
Agreed, but this is in part due to a dysfunctional congress.
As I see it, there are two goals at work:
- Make it harder to vote. (Just like all of the Voter ID arguments that start with “What’s the big deal, just jump through hoops A, then B, then C, then…” Result - some percentage, primarily Dem voters, aren’t going to be able to.)
- Sow confusion to de-ligitimize the outcome.
All of this mucking with the USPS and the various states drop-box shenanigans is serving both of these goals.
And who’s responsible for that? Which party shut down the government in order to cut spending and which party blocked the confirmation of a supreme court justice? Blaming congress is too simplistic; the real problem is that one party doesn’t really believe that everyone ought to vote.
I completely agree. I think the way forward is to hold those responsible accountable in the ways we can, and ensure our votes are counted in doing so, for those of us who can. But your post reminds me that we can also use the court system in advance, especially if the shenanigans are apparent. The courts may not be able to make the post office move faster, but they can order polling places to stay open longer, to accept ballots longer, and other remedies I haven’t thought of, targeted to the particular Trump/GOP scheme.
I’m also not convinced that USPS tampering won’t hurt rural (more likely GOP) voters more than urban ones. If like to see some demographic data about who says they will be mailing their ballot in.
Ref the OP He won’t “shut it down”. That would be obvious and traceable.
Instead it’ll just begin working very badly from now through November. All for individually excusable reasons that collectively are a giant plot.
The thing that really concerns me about the whole end game of this election is that Trump himself is no mastermind. He’s seriously greedy & narcissistic, but no mastermind.
There are capable skillful deeply evil people that have spent years figuring out how to install a dictatorship in the USA. And now they have found (or created) their figurehead to close the deal.
They are the ones we need to find and stop. The USPS caper is just the latest of many dating back to the PATRIOT Act and before. Trump is loving playing his role. But anyone who thinks he’s in the real drivers seat here is IMO sadly mistaken.
They will listen to Fox News, who will blame Obama/Hillary/Biden for the whole mess.