Trump says he opposes funding USPS because of mail-in voting

Starting next Friday, we can request an absentee ballot. I will be requesting mind that day and will take it to the post office myself, that's inside the post office too! Trump and his lackey post master general are trying voter suppression during a pandemic by slowing down the mail?!! Million of people may be disenfranchised, when their ballot arrives late or not at all. What is Trump scared of?!! If he is doing a great job, the people will re-elect him?!!

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/202...toon-MAGA-mail

 

You should care because it would be clear cut voter suppression if he is pushing this. We in would be like Russia fake elections.

 

Not sure of your state but at least in Ohio you can take it to the county board of elections and give it to them.

 

The post office is bankrupt. Cut delivery back to 4 days a week. People can vote in person or roll the dice. Sorry I just do not see any of it as "voter suppression". If I can cart my butt to the polling station, so can everybody else.

 

Show me the law that they have to be fully funded before Congress can turn money over to them
That's bs you wont find Jack.

 

That includes trump then and all military men and those out of country for whatever reason.

 

Of course because you know more than the Inspector General for the USPS.

"The budget status of the U.S. Postal Service has been a matter of both contention and confusion since the 1970 Postal Reorganization Act (PRA) put the Postal Service on a self-sustaining basis, exempting it from general budget and funding laws and denying the executive branch control over its finances. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Postal Service was sometimes included and sometimes excluded from the president’s budget by administrative decision often hinging on whether it was running a surplus or a deficit. When it was on budget, the Postal Service was commonly caught up in deficit reduction squabbles, and took on obligations belonging to the Treasury.

In the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1989, the Postal Service won a hard-fought legislative battle, at some cost, to put its funding permanently off budget. Congress agreed that mail delivery was a self-financing business whose operations should not be scaled up or down depending on national budget considerations. For the past two decades, only the Social Security Trust Funds have shared off-budget status with the Postal Service." https://www.uspsoig.gov/document/federal-budget-treatment-postal-service

 

If you can ride the bus and sit 2 inches from someone then you can wait in line to vote.

 

Wasnt the change to retirement or whatever made after that?

Plus Congress can appropriate funds anyway they see fit as long as it gets passed in both chambers

 

That is bragging that they are self sufficient. It is NOT a mandate.

Try again

 

Ya I didnt bother reading the link until you said something and you seem right. Plus if Congress was not allowed thru some kind of law to fund them then the bill in the new covid bill passed by Congress would not have had anything in it. Someone would've said something.

Why I was skeptic of what he said

 

That does NOT stop Congress from providing additional funding

 

Many people can’t due to their health. Take my girlfriend for example, she has already existing overlapping health conditions, if she were to contact COVID it would most likely kill her. For this reason she currently has to stay away from using public transit or being in any crowded spaces

Something as basic as the right to vote isn’t a thing that US citizens should have to put their own lives at risk to do. That isn’t right, especially when there are alternatives for voting that we have literally been using since the civil war that we’re now suddenly going to hinder instead of expanding during a friggin pandemic

It’s unacceptable

 

The very first provision of the Act (Section 4001) says the funds "Shall Not" be included in the budget of the United states Government or of Congress

 

That's true in every state I believe. Most people can request an absentee ballot , fill it out, and then hand deliver it to the election board prior to the election.

That eliminates the need for in person voting and waiting in onerously long lines. It does not however deal with folks who are infirm and can not physically GET to the election board. They could designate someone to hand deliver it for them but that then becomes subject to the whole "ballot harvesting nonsense that the GOP was caught in ...in North Carolina

 

Your interpretation is incorrect. Their basic operating expenses are not subject to the budget (allowing a certain amount of freedom ) it does not preclude them from getting extra funding from Congress.

Please find someone of note who agrees with your interpretation

 

Mail in ballots are definately not the hill I wish to die on. I've always supported absentee with a reason. I also have always advocated that you should prove who you are while voting but have been told that asking for an ID is racist.

 

It's blatantly partisan and since most black voters are dem voters...it targets them. Is that racist?

 

Maybe they should seek advice from Republican run districts.

 

Sabotage

The U.S. Postal Service recently sent detailed letters to 46 states and D.C. warning that it cannot guarantee all ballots cast by mail for the November election will arrive in time to be counted.

• Six states and D.C. received warnings that ballots could be delayed for a narrow set of voters. Those six are CA, CO, HI, UT, WA, and VT.



• The Postal Service gave 40 others — including the key battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Florida — more-serious warnings that their long-standing deadlines for requesting, returning, or counting ballots were “incongruous” with mail service and that voters who send ballots in close to those deadlines may become disenfranchised. Rather than list all 40 states, it’ll be quicker to say NM, NV, OR, and RI were not notified of any delays - the remaining states were.



• There are two key ballot-related lawsuits in the works in PA in response to the above USPS warning. Gov. Tom Wolf's administration has petitioned the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to extend the deadline for mail-in voting in the November election, allowing mail-in ballots to count for three-days after election day. In another case, Trump sued the PA election boards for allowing no excuse mail-in voting; a judge recently ordered him to provide evidence of the fraud he claims exists.


The U.S. Postal Service proposed removing 20 percent of letter sorting machines it uses around the country before revising the plan weeks later to closer to 15 percent of all machines, meaning 502 will be taken out of service. A map of where the sorting reduction is targeted shows large population centers will suffer the most from a potential slow-down.

• Multiple sources within the postal service told Motherboard they have personally witnessed the machines, which cost millions of dollars, being destroyed or thrown in the dumpster. USPS did not respond to a request for comment.



• “Donald Trump made clear that he is dismantling the Postal Service so he can steal the election by making it harder to vote by mail,” said Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, a signatory of a letter to Postmaster DeJoy. “Removing 20 percent of the Postal Service’s sorting and processing equipment looks like another part of his plan to bulldoze a vital American institution just to cling to power.”


The USPS acknowledged removing blue mailboxes from certain areas, including Oregon where pictures of the event went viral. However, a spokesman claims the receptacles are just being moved to higher-volume areas.

• The spokesman, Ernie Swanson, said USPS is only removing mailboxes where there were already multiple boxes stationed next to each other. USPS has not removed any mailboxes in locations where there was only one, Swanson said. "In locations where we have more than one box sitting in the same spot side by side, we leave one behind," Swanson said.



• Mailboxes have reportedly been removed in parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Oregon and Montana. Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) wrote to DeJoy on Thursday requesting more information about the Postal Service’s plans for its mailboxes. Tester said in a later statement Friday that the Postal Service had paused mailbox removal in his home state, but said DeJoy “still owes Montanans an answer on why mail collection boxes were removed in the first place," and demanded the postmaster general replace the collection boxes that were already removed.


Postmaster DeJoy overhauled the Postal Service’s corporate structure and reassigned 33 top executives in his first nine weeks on the job.

• Analysts say the structure centralizes power around DeJoy, a former logistics executive and major ally of President Trump, and de-emphasizes decades of institutional postal knowledge. All told, 33 staffers included in the old postal hierarchy either kept their jobs or were reassigned in the restructuring, with five more staffers joining the leadership from other roles.



• The Postal Service will implement a hiring freeze, according to the reorganization announcement, and will ask for voluntary early retirements. It also will realign into three “operating units” — retail and delivery, logistics and processing, and commerce and business solutions — and scale down from seven regions to four.


Last month, USPS employees were told the agency was prohibiting overtime and employees were instructed to leave mail behind if it delayed them on their routes. USPS officials have also signaled recently that they are going to more strictly enforce the delivery times guaranteed by the different classes of mail election officials choose to use for their mailings.

• The second memo says the Postal Service will first look to cut its transportation costs, and estimates that late and extra trips cost the agency $200 million annually in “added expenses,” or about the same amount the agency lost in May. The memo warns postal workers that it may be “difficult” to “see mail left behind or mail on the workroom floor,” but that the agency “will address root causes of these delays and adjust the very next day.”



• Some states, particularly those in the western US that automatically mail ballots to every voter, send their election mail as marketing mail, which allows them to send it at a lower cost. Marketing mail had a guaranteed delivery time of three to 10 days, but USPS has traditionally given prioritized attention to ballots that have an official election mail logo. More recently, USPS officials have emphasized officials will get speed for the delivery they pay for.


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Postmaster DeJoy

President Donald Trump met with United States Postmaster General Louis DeJoy at the White House last week amid his ongoing attacks on mail-in voting and ahead of DeJoy's meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer."It was a congratulatory meeting," White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere told CNN.

However, DeJoy hasn’t found the time to meet with election officials concerned about the recent changes at USPS. A bipartisan group of secretaries of state, who are responsible for running elections, requested to meet this week with postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, who was appointed to the job in May. But that meeting has yet to be scheduled.

• David Becker, who runs the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research: "It's entirely reasonable that a bipartisan group of election officials would want more information about whether USPS can meet its obligations to serve American voters, particularly only 81 days out from Election Day," he said. "The fact that the postmaster general is unresponsive to their concerns is unusual, and troubling."


DeJoy’s financial disclosures show continues to hold a multimillion-dollar stake in his former company XPO Logistics, a United States Postal Service contractor, likely creating a major conflict of interest. Raising further alarms, on the same day in June that DeJoy divested large amounts of Amazon shares, he purchased stock options giving him the right to buy new shares of Amazon at a price much lower than their current market price, according to the disclosures.

• "The idea that you can be a postmaster general and hold tens of millions in stocks in a postal service contractor is pretty shocking," said Walter Shaub, the former director of the Office of Government Ethics, who resigned in 2017. "It could be that he's planning on selling it, but I don't understand the delay. He has managed to divest a lot of other things. And if he wasn't prepared to sell that off, he shouldn't have taken the job."



• Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Thursday demanded at the U.S. Postal Service’s internal ethics watchdog investigate what she suggested was “corruption” in the purchase of Amazon stock options by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy after his appointment to that job.


The USPS Inspector General is at least reviewing recent changes made by DeJoy to postal service and allegations of corruption/conflicts of interest. Agapi Doulaveris, a spokeswoman for the USPS watchdog, told CNN in an email, "We have initiated a body of work to address the concerns raised, but cannot comment on the details." Warren spokeswoman Saloni Sharma told CNN: "We have learned that the United States Postal Service Office of the Inspector General is investigating all aspects of our request.”

New Jersey Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. made a criminal referral to state Attorney General Gurbir Grewal, asking him to impanel a grand jury to investigate what Pascrell calls the "accelerating arson" of the U.S. Postal Service by the Trump administration. “We do not have much time to prepare and our state, like others, will rely absolutely on the USPS’s efficiency,” Pascrell wrote. “Amid this ongoing pandemic, the USPS will be the electoral heart and engine or New Jersey’s and America’s electoral machinery.”

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What can you do?

The best defense is, if possible, to vote in person. For some, this will mean going to the polls in November, in the middle of flu season, when the spread of Covid-19 may worsen. This is a personal decision that no one can make for you.

In most states, you can receive your ballot by mail but return it to the local elections office or to an early voting location - you can bypass the line. Some states also have official ballot drop boxes. This will circumvent the USPS entirely in the timely delivery of your ballot.

• Check your local elections website to see if this is possible for your area. If you can't find an answer, let me know (PM me) and I will try to help you find one!


Whether you plan on voting by mail or returning your mail ballot directly to the elections office, DO IT EARLY. Seriously, do it the first day possible in your state. If using the USPS to return your ballot, it seems that you must mail it back by October 22 to ensure it is received by election day (Nov. 3).

Another suggestion, if using USPS to return your ballot, is to put a 55-cent stamp on your mail-in ballot. Recall, from above, the USPS is emphasizing that you will get speed for the delivery you pay for. In the case of ballots, that is 10-days delivery time. Putting a 55-cent stamp on your return envelope - no matter if it is already pre-printed with bulk postage - should force the ballot to be delivered as first-class mail, arriving in 2-5 days maximum.

• I would caution, if using this strategy, to still mail your ballot back by Oct. 22 to be safe.


...

Some Americans have already developed plans to ensure their vote is counted. Do you have a plan? Make one!

...But leave it to a southern Black woman to cut through the nonsense and focus on a common-sense, practical solution. Take your ballot directly to the board of elections.

Sylvia Smalls, a 77-year-old retired teacher from Charleston, S.C., dropped this bit of wisdom during a Zoom birthday party… “In order to make sure my ballot is received in time to be counted, I’m going to do two things. First, if my absentee ballot doesn’t arrive in early October as expected, I’m going to keep calling the elections office until it arrives,” Miss Sylvia told me when I followed up via email. “Second, once my absentee ballot arrives, I’m going to complete it, drive to the elections office, put on a mask, go inside, and hand-deliver it to the elections clerk.”


You may recall earlier this year, thanks to conservative judges, Wisconsinites were forced to show up to vote in person in the middle of the pandemic.

Clarence Carter, 70, said he was voting in person because he filed for an absentee ballot weeks ago but did not receive it. His wife has health issues and couldn’t stand in the line, he said.

So why vote?

“It’s the ballot or the bullet,” he said, quoting the famous speech by Malcolm X…

"I have to come down here today and risk my life to vote and I'm happy to do it because that is my right," RoseMary Oliveira Milwaukee’s WDJT. "I'm here, they're not going to stop me from voting."...

"Although I remain deeply concerned about the public health implications of voting in-person today, I am overwhelmed by the bravery, resilience, and heroism of those who are defending our democracy by showing up to vote, working the polls, and reporting on this election," Gov. Evers said in a statement.

 

So

So in all the 49 years I have been voting I have been suppressed because I couldn't do so by mail?

 

Yes the USPS is not a division of the state election board and operates on its own schedule. You want something there priority next day guarantied delivery you pay extra for it. And why are state taxpayers funding the postage for mail in ballots in the first place. They don't pay for my gas to go vote. If these states do not schedule the dates according to USPS requirements then they are to blame.

Me I'll be driving to my local polling place on the 25th for a local election and will walk in just as I do everywhere else with my mask and with my pen and will take about 5 minutes to vote. And I will leave knowing my ballot has been cart.

 

That state is ran by a Republican.... and of course I bet where they are consolidating the stations are in minority neighborhoods...

 

You could military has been voting by mail since the first election.

 

I think that deals with the law in voting that it is supposed to be free it would be like charging ppl to vote (not making excusr so dont shoot the messenger because I already know your reply......). I do believe everyone who gets voting ticket in the mail gets a prepaid envelope with the ballot.