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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

You could do all of that, or you could take note that USPS halted overtime during one of the busiest periods of business in recent history.

UPS is renting UHauls in my area to replenish delivery trucks in the field. Drivers are working OT as late as 9PM.

USPS isn’t backfilling positions or using OT hours!

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Pretty clear this is an intentional move by the Trump appointee DeJoy. It's a classic Republican tactic. Appoint someone to screw up a public service. Use that as an argument that it doesn't work. Privatize it so your rich friends can make a killing. It also has the added benefit of complicating mail in voting which might help the Republicans keep the senate and presidency. While I agree the postal service has some issues the current problems are entirely artificial.

Intentional mismanagement due to ideology and greed.

https://fortune.com/2020/07/24/usps-mail-delivery-postmaster...

> The Postal Service is a joke,” said the President in May.

> “Every time we’ve slowed down mail, we’ve lost revenue,” said Dimondstein. The new postmaster general, he said, instituted sweeping policy change after just one month in his position and without consulting any unions or representatives with deep institutional knowledge.

> “These changes are happening because there’s a White House agenda to privatize and sell off the public Postal Service,” said Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union.

I was inclined to correct your spelling of 'du jour' before I realized I just don't know the name of the Postmaster General.

On the one hand, that sounds plausible on the face of it. Underhanded political shenanigans aren't rare.

On the other hand, I hear this used as a fully general explanation for every messed-up public service, including ones in places like the Bay Area, where government-run services are usually run very poorly and Republicans have near-zero influence. And there are so many other reasons why a public service is likely to end up poorly run eventually: bad incentives, otherwise-good incentives that don't incentivize their own preservation, accumulation of increasingly heavyweight bureaucracy and procedures, gradual transfer of power from leaders who know how to do new things to leaders who only know how to do the same things, and so on. Blaming everything on political sabotage doesn't seem like a great fit.

(Maybe in the case of the USPS it really is a case of political sabotage, but this is why I'm skeptical of those claims in general.)

I totally get your concern, and I'm sure people tire of having partisan politics used as explanation too often for issues of the day, but that seems pretty darn explicit in the case of the USPS[1]

Anecdotal stories should be taken at a grain of salt, but I've heard more complains about package delivery in the last couple weeks from people who didn't know anything about the political rumblings at USPS, and that combined with the recent appointment news makes me doubt that it's just a coincidence.

[1]:https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/14/postal-se...

Who said only republicans do this? Defunding public services is basically a bipartisan agreement in the US since the clinton days. And the overton windows of the parties are not the same in California as they are in Alabama, anyways.

This is at the direction of a Trump appointee. Career USPS workers are not happy about it and their union is exploring options, last I heard.

Unions: They're Actually A Good Thing.

We're 4 months into the pandemic and their workload is only going to get worse if we have nationwide mail in ballots. If they're going to do something, they should get on it instead of letting their members suffer.

Not sure about USPS specifically, but our canada post is just finally catching up now.

They explained it was basically christmas holiday load, without the extra staff, with less staff on a non busy time (people taking covid related time off for sickness and family).

While I definitely had a couple packages arrive late in the April/May timeframe, since June I've had a couple packages actually show up before the delivery date Canada Post gave.

Yea since June definately been better.

Seems they caught up on international (from china) customs backlog.

Ordered in March, came early June.

Recent ordered in July, got china package in 2 weeks

You'd have to be pretty crazy to actually mail your mail-in ballot. What is the only way to expose every election in the country to the meddling of the federal executive branch? Interpose the USPS between the voter and local election officials! Whether by incompetence or malice they'll find a way to fuck it up. I intend to carry my own ballot to the county election office.

That's fine for you but that's not saying much because that approach is not at all scalable.

Wait, why? It scales at least as well as in-person voting.

Welp, I'm an out-of-country voter personally. I can't really walk 3000 miles.

When I lived abroad I delivered my ballot to my nearest consulate. I understand they are just putting it in the mail, of course.

Except in areas that use more polling stations than they have county election offices.

In California at least, you can drop your mail-in ballot off at a polling station.

I don't think that mail in ballots will significantly affect the USPS. They do about half a billion mail items per day. Ballots for everyone who is registered to vote is mabye 200 million. Ballots are also small. Packages take much more time to handle by the mail carrier.

Critically, mail in ballots are generally not accepted late. USPS will get everything where it's going eventually - but if the Trump appointee announces an impromtu postal holiday the week before the election then

1. Probably nothing technically illegal has happened

2. Nobody's mail-in-vote will arrive in time to be counted

This coupled with the fact that those rabid Trump fans will be showing up at the polls in person might[1] be enough to tip it in his favor.

1. It still might not be enough though, he is doing hilariously abysmally in polls.

As Wisconsin demonstrated, the attempts at voter suppression will likely backfire. If the Republicans had agreed to mail-in balloting or a delayed primary, they might have held on to the state supreme court seat they lost, but what they ended up doing kept Republican voters home (why go vote in person in a pandemic when there's no top of the ballot choice to make) while the Democrats stood in line (between the obvious attempt to make them stay home [Streisand effect] and the real impact of their top of the ballot choice). I'm just some schmuck in another state and I could see the likely outcome of the attempt at voting suppression before it happened, but Republicans seem to have only two tools in their toolbox anymore: tax cuts and voter suppression, and those tools aren't doing the job now and hurt more than help.

Doesn't your mail in ballot just need to be postmarked by election day to count? Its not the day its received, its the day its sent that counts.

probably depends on the state?

The point is that mail-in ballots are time-sensitive and the USPS has already fallen behind on its current workload.

I've seen tweets of e-tailers saying some packages (very small+light first class... the kind that are only cost effective thru USPS) are taking weeks when they used to take 1-4 days.

Unless USPS magically becomes more efficient in the next 100 days, their backlog of work will grow and non-prioritized deliveries will fall further behind. It will especially hurt voting is Amazon (or other packages) have higher delivery priority than ballots and ballot materials (usually 4+ items per voter per election).

Delivery is based on routes, which are designed to take 8 hours to fulfill on average. If there's a heavy parcel day, bad weather, coverage for sick workers, etc, the 8 hours may be 11 hours.

Now, they stop working after 8 hours in most cases and leave whatever is left in a pile to be done later. Just like with computers, when you develop a backlog in a system optimized for throughput, things tend to get worse.

You shouldn't be downvoted for stating the fact that this changed drastically under the new Trump appointee, who has donated millions to his and other republican campaigns.

The down votes are probably more along the unnecessary line about unions.

But wasn’t Canada Post also having some overload and delays? Blaming Trump for absolutely everything is getting to be a tied old canard.

The new head of the USPS is a big campaign donor and made specific changes in how the post office works that are bad. I'm blaming the literal choices of Trump's appointment, that appear to help Trump.

https://fortune.com/2020/07/24/usps-mail-delivery-postmaster...

Ah, Canada does a lot of things right - post isn't one of them. Even pre-COVID the two post systems operated on quite different levels.

Which appointee?

DeJoy

Yep! Republicans want to privatize the USPS. This is just one more step in that direction to get the public pissed off with USPS and blame them.

Correct. Trump gave the USPS a new head a few months ago, it's a guy with no postal expertise either.

Specifically it's the guy who got $700 million in stimulus loans for a trucking business that was only worth $70 million.

https://www.salon.com/2020/07/01/former-ceo-of-troubled-truc...

As anyone could have easily seen coming, Trump used the stimulus money like a slush fund and this guy was paid to destroy USPS in general and specifically to screw with mail-in ballots during the election.

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