At what point is the stuff happening with the USPS criminal? I've only been watching from a distance but the post office drama has struck me particularly sharply as a big red flag of corruption, a large threat to our democracy, and something we should be very upset about. Criminally upset about.
One of the most transparently political acts of voter suppression that has ever occurred in the US. This is the sort of thing we should expect to happen in Venezuela, Haiti, Russia, or Afghanistan...and now it is our political reality. My great grandparents left Portugal for the US, then a beacon of freedom, when things like this started happening in the 1920s. I'm reliving all of their stories now, and now I'm thinking I might have to emigrate back to Portugal, which is now a relative beacon of freedom.
>One of the most transparently political acts of voter suppression that has ever occurred in the US.
I totally agree! For months media has encouraged large group gatherings in the form of protests and riots and now they tell us to not "gather" to vote but instead mail it in. It's crazy!
It's not voting by mail in and of itself that is the problem.
It is the willful dismantling of postal processing machinery to slow and reduce the throughput of the postal system, thereby threatening vote-by-mail ballots to be not delivered on time and possibly lost.
The timing and overall effect stink of corruption and voter suppression.
I've long had a high opinion of the USPS overall. And this quote from the article sounds like Tacoma is keeping it real, and getting the production job done, at an especially critical time:
> By Wednesday night, five of the machines in Tacoma had been reconnected. Parts of two others had been scavenged and incorporated into the plant’s existing machines to boost their mail-sorting capacity.
If you disconnect machines, you can slow down the mail, which means that you can slow down the votes of people who have indicated via polls that they are overwhelmingly going to vote for someone else.
The given reason was "they don't need them anymore because mail volume is down". It was a cost cutting measure.
However, if you look at the data, mail volume isn't down enough to justify removing the machines, and more importantly there is an expected massive spike in mail volume in the next few months as record numbers of people vote by mail. Also most of these removals have been in cities that traditionally vote Democrat.
So really the answer is, "to slow down the mail so that there is doubt cast upon the validity of the election results and also to try and stop absentee ballots that are most likely voting for Democrats from arriving on time".
What’s crazy is that the supposed small government politicians who believe that the Post Office is another sign of “big government” doing what private industry should be doing don’t realize that the post office is specifically spelled out in the Constitution as one of the responsibilities of the government.
It's actually an authorized power, not a responsibility (arguably, the responsibility being a view of the founders can be viewed as an implicit in the power, but only the power is express in the text.)
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 15.3 ms ] threadAm I off base?
I couldn't help but think... are some employees sitting out covid and is chaos in charge?
I totally agree! For months media has encouraged large group gatherings in the form of protests and riots and now they tell us to not "gather" to vote but instead mail it in. It's crazy!
It is the willful dismantling of postal processing machinery to slow and reduce the throughput of the postal system, thereby threatening vote-by-mail ballots to be not delivered on time and possibly lost.
The timing and overall effect stink of corruption and voter suppression.
> By Wednesday night, five of the machines in Tacoma had been reconnected. Parts of two others had been scavenged and incorporated into the plant’s existing machines to boost their mail-sorting capacity.
Are they just saying "disconnect the machines" without giving any reason to do so?
However, if you look at the data, mail volume isn't down enough to justify removing the machines, and more importantly there is an expected massive spike in mail volume in the next few months as record numbers of people vote by mail. Also most of these removals have been in cities that traditionally vote Democrat.
So really the answer is, "to slow down the mail so that there is doubt cast upon the validity of the election results and also to try and stop absentee ballots that are most likely voting for Democrats from arriving on time".
And they know, they just don't care.
https://m.imgur.com/gallery/fBALblG