argh! said:
you are pointing out how voting would become more difficult - isn't that knee capping? not everybody has the luxury of time like you and i do.
the post office provides a vital service. your law firm would have been nothing without it. but trump has been kneecapping it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/11/post-office-bailout-trump/
The announced changes were to help get the PO's operation to meet the lower demand that has declined substantially in the last decade, and for more efficiency. Now, the head of the PO has said that no changes will be made until after the elections.
Here are some PO stats:
"Although the Postal Service has slowly whittled down its offices and workforce during the past two decades, revenue-generating services have declined much more rapidly.
Since 2000, the overall volume of mail handled annually has fallen by 31.4%, from 207.9 billion pieces to 142.6 billion in 2019.
First-class mail, a profitable service, has declined by 33.6% in the past decade. Package delivery has increased substantially but has not filled the gap.
The USPS has not turned a net profit since 2006. Between 2007 and March 31 of this year, the service has incurred cumulative losses of $83.1 billion, only some of which is attributable to expenses within the control of management. It owes more than $11 billion to the U.S. Treasury and $59 billion in mandatory but unpaid contributions to employee pension and retiree health funds, as Pew Research notes.
[For example, the PO doesn't need as many letter sorter machines as it used to.]
Only a handful of states vote exclusively by mail, and few are proposing to join them. But some 40% or 50% of Americans have said in polls that they’d prefer to vote by mail this year; only about 24% voted by mail or absentee in 2016. More ballots will reach voters too late to be returned on time. Four years ago, about 1% of mail-in ballots were rejected for this and other reasons. This year, the share could be high enough to make a difference in contested states.
[
The point is that the states need to change their dates for mail-in voting, if they want to ensure that there is plenty of time to vote by mail. What's so hard about doing that?]
Reforming the USPS raises difficult social questions, too. More than 23% of its employees are black, compared with 13% for the overall U.S. workforce. While veterans make up 6% of the workforce, the Postal Service employs more than 100,000 of them, about 16% of its employees.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/putting-aside-politics-on-the-post-office-11597770716?mod=opinion_featst_pos3
The WaPost article you linked was April 11. Long ago. The Dems tried to stick the PO into the Virus Relief bill. Mnuchin rejected it. What does the PO have to do with virus relief?]
