So the US Postal Service has now changed its processing rules such that the postmark on any mail received by the USPS will no longer be dated according to the date or receipt, but rather by the date of processing.
Which will obviously have an impact on people mailing in their tax returns at the last minute but also opens the door for a lot of jiggery-fuckery around postal voting.
Want to mail your vote in? Then you better hope you live somewhere where the “processing delay” isn’t something that can be tweaked to potentially mark postal votes as submitted past the deadline.
I’m sure there may be some valid logistical rationale for doing it this way but it seems strange that in a world where use of actual mail is dropping, this change that could massively impact which votes are counted has come into force right now. And even if it had an innocent genesis, you can bet your sweet bippy the GOP will have their filthy little fingers all over it…
My understanding for the reasoning is that they’re not having the local offices, the ones that pick up mail from drop boxes and houses, handle postmarking, but instead doing that at the larger processing facilities. That said, you should still be able to walk into a local post office and ask them to post mark it for you.
WRT voting, in the past few elections, for both political and crime (mailboxes getting broken into) reasons, it already made sense to take your ballots directly to the post office. If you have the time and ability, I always recommend taking it directly to your city hall.
This is correct - confirmed online and by my local post office.
I’m surprised that anyone mailing something needing today’s postmark would be content to simply drop it in a box and hope. I can verify that this does not always work.
Once, back when most people still mailed in their returns, I missed the deadline by a couple of days. I called the IRS to ask what I should do, and the very helpful woman said (paraphrasing since it was 25 years ago): “Nobody sits there and checks all the postmarks. Send it in, and if it arrives within a week or so, nobody will notice”
The long delays counting votes are mostly because Republican office-holders don’t allow the counting to start until all of the votes are in. They do this because it causes delays, which they can complain about and point to as evidence of fraud.
In California: “Vote-by-mail ballots that are mailed must be postmarked on or before Election Day and received by your county elections office no later than 7 days after Election Day.”
Allowing them to be counted that late causes unnecessary delays in results and fosters false claims of vote manipulation.
That link has a chart of the certification deadlines for all states. Many of them certify as late as December, including California, which has a deadline of December 7. The myth of late ballots is an ideological tactic rather than a results changer.
Back when my tax bite wasn’t so large, I would routinely do this as an experiment. Given the huge mass of incoming mail the IRS gets in Mid-April, I predicted no one was checking postmarks. My experience matched the advice you received.
With ballots, I’m not sure it really matters if some are invalidated because they are past the date. Certainly it’s important to count all the votes, but I’m not sure it would make any kind of significant difference. If votes are invalidated because they are past the date, chances are it’s just a small number of votes, and I would guess the vote breakdown would be consistent with how votes overall are split. So if the votes are split 60/40 between the candidates, I would expect the mail in votes to be pretty close to that breakdown. Unless there’s some reason that voters of a certain side are especially over-represented in mail in ballots and those voters typically send in their ballots very late, it seems like the small number of votes invalidated because they are postmarked late would not affect the election in any meaningful way.
It would surely make a difference if ballots from certain areas are postmarked late but not others. Like urban areas vs. rural areas. Voters are not distributed homogeneously. For instance, voters from urban areas tend to be Democrat-leaning, while voters from rural areas tend to be Republican-leaning.
And elections in many areas of the country can swing the final result by very small shifts (of a few percentage points).
Finally, whether it changes the result or not, not counting votes is a very bad message to send if you are in favor of increasing democratic (small-d) participation.
More importantly, if they owe you money, they don’t care when you file for it. If you owe them money, sure they want it, but where’s the value of going after someone who has a correctly submitted form with proper payment even if it shows up a few days late? It’d cost the government more than its worth.
Obviously you missed the narrative. If the returns on election day show that the “right” candidate is winning, the Democrat Fraud Squad swings into action and floods the system with illegal ballots that still get counted, even though they arrived late.
I think the reason is to fuck up mail in voting. Somehow the ballots from Gotrocks Acres will be postmarked with all due haste while the ballots from Skidrow Heights will take weeks to get their postmarks.
I don’t favor doing or not doing things for fear of conspiracy theories. MAGAbots will never accept an election that they don’t win, so fuck their asses.
given our current reality, there is no reason to assume this change was made for anything but fucking up voting in some way that benefits the Repubes. I’m in Oregon where voting by mail has been working perfectly so of course changes need to be made.
