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Comment by elmer2 | Hacker News Reader

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It never ceases to amaze me what information is online. There's a Wikipedia article on the history of US postal rates [0], which lists several increases in the last few years alone.

It apparently has one small mistake though, because it says the postal regulatory commission (PRC) sets rates, while the PRC website says they only set rate limits and the USPS sets their own rates [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_posta...

[1] https://prc.gov/who-sets-postal-rates

> With all of the cheating and dirty tricks from the Democrats (picking the same name as your opponent to confuse voters), I hope the Democrats never take power again.

You apparently don't realize that this is not something new, Republicans have done the same thing. So do you hope Republicans also never take power again?

It's because they aren't allowed to increase the cost of postage due to a federal mandate from decades ago.

That's false. The USPS has raised postal rates a number of times in the past several years, without requiring Congressional approval. Hell, they literally just increased rates less than a month ago. https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2026/0825-...

With all of the cheating and dirty tricks from the Democrats (picking the same name as your opponent to confuse voters),

LOL the best and only example you can come up with is the one legal "trick" the Democrats did, and they got the idea from the Republicans. In 2024, Republicans encouraged two guys with the same name as the WA state attorney to run against him in the gubernatorial election. It didn't work then, and the only reason it would work now is if Alaska voters are too illiterate to read the "Republican" in the incumbent's candidate name box on the ballot.

Meanwhile, the GOP DOJ keeps trying to take away the voting rights with knowingly false claims that U.S. citizens are illegal immigrants, even after an analysis showed that more than half of the names on their list were U.S. citizen and the remainder were never registered to vote. https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/doj-california-...

Keep your MAGA propaganda on 8chan where it belongs.

Plus with the magic of ranked choice voting those few "confused" voters would likely still end up voting for their intended candidate in the end, assuming they ranked both people with similar names over everyone else.

Sure seems like this ranked choice voting solves a lot of problems over the first past the post style we mostly do.

>(picking the same name as your opponent to confuse voters)

Here's the ballot that some suggest would confuse voters: https://ballotpedia.org/Alaska_official_sample_ballots,_2026

Could you clarify whether you expect the ballot to confuse a zero or non-zero number of people. If zero, why did their campaign staffers go out of their way to find an exact named person to put on the ballot for, in your view, an obviously futile effort. If non zero why shouldn't we care that these confused voters got disenfranchised.

>why did their campaign staffers go out of their way to find an exact named person to put on the ballot

A bold allegation, which, if untrue, renders your question moot

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/28/us/politics/alaska-dan-su...

Yes, that's the allegation. You'll note that it is still under dispute.

They have stack ranked voting. Even if you are confused, your vote ends up counting correctly.

Also, this is nothing new, republicans did it too and non a peep of complaint.

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