There'd be enough to do that if the USPS wasn't busy burning thousands of tons of Diesel fuel to haul Verizon and Citi card advertisements to everyone else.
Or the 5+ oversized "vote for me" flyers that have been coming everyday for weeks (even after doing the early in-person voting). If one didn't change my mind, 10 from the same candidate isn't going to change my mind either. Election season is terrible for USPS and my phone's text messages.
Luckily my apartment has a recycling bin next to the mailboxes so all of the oversized stuff like that ends up there immediately, the rest I keep in a box until it's shredding time.
Supposedly mail is so rare now that those bulk mail advertising items are the only thing sustaining the USPS' daily delivery operations. Without the, stamp price would have to be far higher.
Perhaps they should increase the stamp price then? I don't think I get ANYTHING of value in stamped/prepaid envelopes at this point (I just throw all my mail in a box and shred it when it fills up). In the past year, I think the mail I actually wanted to receive could be counted on two hands, far outweighed by credit card offers, political flyers, and other crap.
In the stamp area, there is a note for either "first class", "non-profit", or "presorted standard" aka "PRE-STD". Normal mail is first class. Standard is spam.
Once you figure that out, it makes sorting the mail real quick. Never has standard ever been important, even if it comes from a company that I do business with.
It's almost like the republicans would be better off if they paid attention to their constitutional duties instead of just burning things down.
This will clearly hurt them in statewide elections, but I wonder how it plays out in local rural elections. I can imagine the rejected ballots leaning more blue than average in heavily red areas.
I can also imagine the opposite: Older folks have less mobility on average, and are probably more likely to mail the ballots in. The Propublica article doesn't say anything about this, but I imagine some election officials track it.
Their ID requirements in Ohio blew back a similar way a few years ago. They made it extremely hard to vote without a driver's license, thinking it'd hit college kids, but it mostly hit retirees that no longer drive.
I think the plan is to declare all Democratic wins as false and go from there. To give that some veneer of respectability, they need to sow some distrust beforehand. The ID requirements serve that purpose well, if nothing else.
It's so frustrating. If I want to mail something out, it sits for over a day in the local post office. Even Priority Mail Express can no longer get something out locally overnight. If I need overnight service, I have to drive a significant distance to get to a UPS station to get something into the network.
If something mis-sorts to the wrong post office, it sits for over a day at that remote post office before it can re-enter the stream.
I have had more and more late and missorted packages that compound the late deliveries and all I want to do is cry that I can't get the mail anymore in a reasonable fashion.
people still fall for this Republicans “fixing” shit election after election after election, quite fascinating to watch when you don’t give a hoot who is in power
10 years ago, mail service used to be great. Than Trump brought in the idiot from FedEx who "upgraded" the mail service. Even though the volume of mail has dropped 50%, the USPS now struggles to properly process the remaining mail on a timely basis.
Local deliveries used to be overnight; now they take up to a week. Transnational deliveries can take months.
I hope the primary effect of this will be that millions of MAGA votes go uncounted this year and in 2028, because they're the ones that voted for this in the first place.
This has nothing to do with the Fedex guy. It's because they aren't allowed to increase the cost of postage due to a federal mandate from decades ago.
"I hope the primary effect of this will be that millions of MAGA votes go uncounted this year and in 2028, because they're the ones that voted for this in the first place."
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.
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.
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].
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.
> 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?
All this ballot-this and ballot-that is so easily solved if only those who oppose showing ID would drop their objections. Here's how it works:
1: show up at polling location, either on voting day or within the early voting period.
2: show ID to poll worker who verifies it and hands over the ballots for the elections in which you have the right to vote
3: fill in the ballots, put them in the envelope(s) and hand these over to a poll worker
4: poll worker checks again whether you have voting rights for the specific elections and drops the envelopes into the correct voting urns
Done. No postal service involved. You can vote at any (early) voting location for national elections, for local ones you'll need to go to a local voting location where the required ballots are available. Early voting can start a few weeks before election day so nearly everyone should have the possibility to set aside half an hour to an hour to do their civic duty.
That leaves those who really can't make it to the polls. For these people there can be a verified postal ballot system, i.e. they get one sent home on request, fill it out and send it back in the required envelopes. Voting by mail always adds risks but since it would only be needed for a small fraction of the voters that risk is manageable. Mail-in votes need to be counted on election day so they need to be in the mail about a week before election day. Why you ask? Because the fraud risk of mail-in ballots makes it all too easy to use them to add enough votes to push a close race towards a specific candidate. Count them early on election day and publish the results, these need to be final results, before the rest of the votes are counted. There's plenty of countries where votes are counted this way, this is not rocket science. I have voting rights in 2 different countries in northern and western Europe, both use something resembling this scheme. Everyone shows his or her ID either to get the ballots or to have them deposited in the voting urns, this has never been contested and the mere thought of voting without ID is so clearly outrageously silly that nobody brings it up. All the arguments against showing ID have been proven to be specious at best, you need ID to do just about anything related to the government so insisting on voting without it only serves to undermine trust in elections.
ID is already required in the US to vote. You are required to register to vote, and that registration includes an identity check. Performing the check at this stage allows the time to verify identity and correct any issues, well before voting day.
To the down-voters: get a life, nothing in my post is downvote-worthy. Just because The Party doesn't allow you to agree with anyone who points out that this is a solved problem in most nations doesn't mean you need to press that button, you're not getting any brownie-points and you won't get a cookie other than the one from the web server.
To all those who reacted with 'ID required to register to vote': you're missing the part where the postal services need to get involved to deliver ballots which this article is about. You're also missing the part where 'registering to vote' does not mean the ballot is filled in by the person registered to vote, let alone the part where voter rolls are heavily polluted with people who moved or died still registered at an address to which ballots get delivered. You know this to be the case, you've seen the reports on the voter rolls, you may even have received ballots for people who used to live on your addresses. Denying it doesn't make it go away. Maybe that's the point? It is getting harder and harder to take the reasons to refuse voter ID at face value given that, as said, this is the way it works in a large part of the world. Checking ID at the polling location is normal in most countries. It is the sane and smart thing to do, never mind the bollocks excuses The Party makes up against it. Once person, one vote (per election), close to guaranteed.
voting should be frictionless and not have to go anywhere
it's a constitutional right, not something you should have to jump through hoops
people don't have the time to take off work and not get paid and wait in line for hours which is exactly what many places do now by reducing voting location radically
many people can't even afford a car these days or to fill it with gas
if you insist on in person voting, make it a paid day off
the ID thing is a false narrative, it's not ID that's the problem, it's that it costs money to get the ID and now they want your birth certificate saying the ID doesn't even prove you are a citizen with "realID"
> The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.
Any states requiring a particular kind of ID for voting have to make a suitable ID available for free, they cannot charge for it or it becomes a de facto poll tax. That means that while they may accept a driver's license or passport (which cost, at least in every state I know of DLs aren't free), they also have to have some suitable free ID (other than the time to obtain it). But even the time to obtain an ID can become subject to lawsuits against states if they try to play games with it like closing down DMV locations or cutting down on operating hours to make it harder for people to obtain the necessary ID.
You missed the part where registering to vote requires ID in the first place, so the only thing being added are opportunities to deny the right to vote which has already been asserted.
Of course a few rural votes will be rejected, but rest assured plenty more of the urban votes will be rejected too, for a net gain of many rural votes!
There'd be enough to do that if the USPS wasn't busy burning thousands of tons of Diesel fuel to haul Verizon and Citi card advertisements to everyone else.
The post office was in the process of switching to electric but T's postmaster stopped that.
Or the 5+ oversized "vote for me" flyers that have been coming everyday for weeks (even after doing the early in-person voting). If one didn't change my mind, 10 from the same candidate isn't going to change my mind either. Election season is terrible for USPS and my phone's text messages.
Academic and electrical evidence does correlate high numbers of flyers with higher vote shares.
https://www.markpack.org.uk/159114/leaflets/
Luckily my apartment has a recycling bin next to the mailboxes so all of the oversized stuff like that ends up there immediately, the rest I keep in a box until it's shredding time.
Supposedly mail is so rare now that those bulk mail advertising items are the only thing sustaining the USPS' daily delivery operations. Without the, stamp price would have to be far higher.
Perhaps they should increase the stamp price then? I don't think I get ANYTHING of value in stamped/prepaid envelopes at this point (I just throw all my mail in a box and shred it when it fills up). In the past year, I think the mail I actually wanted to receive could be counted on two hands, far outweighed by credit card offers, political flyers, and other crap.
In the stamp area, there is a note for either "first class", "non-profit", or "presorted standard" aka "PRE-STD". Normal mail is first class. Standard is spam.
Once you figure that out, it makes sorting the mail real quick. Never has standard ever been important, even if it comes from a company that I do business with.
It's almost like the republicans would be better off if they paid attention to their constitutional duties instead of just burning things down.
This will clearly hurt them in statewide elections, but I wonder how it plays out in local rural elections. I can imagine the rejected ballots leaning more blue than average in heavily red areas.
I can also imagine the opposite: Older folks have less mobility on average, and are probably more likely to mail the ballots in. The Propublica article doesn't say anything about this, but I imagine some election officials track it.
Their ID requirements in Ohio blew back a similar way a few years ago. They made it extremely hard to vote without a driver's license, thinking it'd hit college kids, but it mostly hit retirees that no longer drive.
I think the plan is to declare all Democratic wins as false and go from there. To give that some veneer of respectability, they need to sow some distrust beforehand. The ID requirements serve that purpose well, if nothing else.
this is an anchor link to their zip-code check near middle of page:
* https://www.propublica.org/article/mail-ballot-delays-postal...
Yep. Welcome to "regional transportation optimization". Every single day is painful being in an RTO territory for the post office.
https://www.savethepostoffice.com/rto-n2024-1/
It's so frustrating. If I want to mail something out, it sits for over a day in the local post office. Even Priority Mail Express can no longer get something out locally overnight. If I need overnight service, I have to drive a significant distance to get to a UPS station to get something into the network.
If something mis-sorts to the wrong post office, it sits for over a day at that remote post office before it can re-enter the stream.
I have had more and more late and missorted packages that compound the late deliveries and all I want to do is cry that I can't get the mail anymore in a reasonable fashion.
Looking at the map, I can't see how this isn't a good thing? Rural areas have been over-subsidized for way too long.
"Government doesn't work. Elect us and we'll fix^H^H^H prove it." - Republicans
people still fall for this Republicans “fixing” shit election after election after election, quite fascinating to watch when you don’t give a hoot who is in power
10 years ago, mail service used to be great. Than Trump brought in the idiot from FedEx who "upgraded" the mail service. Even though the volume of mail has dropped 50%, the USPS now struggles to properly process the remaining mail on a timely basis.
Local deliveries used to be overnight; now they take up to a week. Transnational deliveries can take months.
I hope the primary effect of this will be that millions of MAGA votes go uncounted this year and in 2028, because they're the ones that voted for this in the first place.
This has nothing to do with the Fedex guy. It's because they aren't allowed to increase the cost of postage due to a federal mandate from decades ago.
"I hope the primary effect of this will be that millions of MAGA votes go uncounted this year and in 2028, because they're the ones that voted for this in the first place."
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.
>(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.
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
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.
> 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?
All this ballot-this and ballot-that is so easily solved if only those who oppose showing ID would drop their objections. Here's how it works:
1: show up at polling location, either on voting day or within the early voting period.
2: show ID to poll worker who verifies it and hands over the ballots for the elections in which you have the right to vote
3: fill in the ballots, put them in the envelope(s) and hand these over to a poll worker
4: poll worker checks again whether you have voting rights for the specific elections and drops the envelopes into the correct voting urns
Done. No postal service involved. You can vote at any (early) voting location for national elections, for local ones you'll need to go to a local voting location where the required ballots are available. Early voting can start a few weeks before election day so nearly everyone should have the possibility to set aside half an hour to an hour to do their civic duty.
That leaves those who really can't make it to the polls. For these people there can be a verified postal ballot system, i.e. they get one sent home on request, fill it out and send it back in the required envelopes. Voting by mail always adds risks but since it would only be needed for a small fraction of the voters that risk is manageable. Mail-in votes need to be counted on election day so they need to be in the mail about a week before election day. Why you ask? Because the fraud risk of mail-in ballots makes it all too easy to use them to add enough votes to push a close race towards a specific candidate. Count them early on election day and publish the results, these need to be final results, before the rest of the votes are counted. There's plenty of countries where votes are counted this way, this is not rocket science. I have voting rights in 2 different countries in northern and western Europe, both use something resembling this scheme. Everyone shows his or her ID either to get the ballots or to have them deposited in the voting urns, this has never been contested and the mere thought of voting without ID is so clearly outrageously silly that nobody brings it up. All the arguments against showing ID have been proven to be specious at best, you need ID to do just about anything related to the government so insisting on voting without it only serves to undermine trust in elections.
ID is already required in the US to vote. You are required to register to vote, and that registration includes an identity check. Performing the check at this stage allows the time to verify identity and correct any issues, well before voting day.
To the down-voters: get a life, nothing in my post is downvote-worthy. Just because The Party doesn't allow you to agree with anyone who points out that this is a solved problem in most nations doesn't mean you need to press that button, you're not getting any brownie-points and you won't get a cookie other than the one from the web server.
To all those who reacted with 'ID required to register to vote': you're missing the part where the postal services need to get involved to deliver ballots which this article is about. You're also missing the part where 'registering to vote' does not mean the ballot is filled in by the person registered to vote, let alone the part where voter rolls are heavily polluted with people who moved or died still registered at an address to which ballots get delivered. You know this to be the case, you've seen the reports on the voter rolls, you may even have received ballots for people who used to live on your addresses. Denying it doesn't make it go away. Maybe that's the point? It is getting harder and harder to take the reasons to refuse voter ID at face value given that, as said, this is the way it works in a large part of the world. Checking ID at the polling location is normal in most countries. It is the sane and smart thing to do, never mind the bollocks excuses The Party makes up against it. Once person, one vote (per election), close to guaranteed.
voting should be frictionless and not have to go anywhere
it's a constitutional right, not something you should have to jump through hoops
people don't have the time to take off work and not get paid and wait in line for hours which is exactly what many places do now by reducing voting location radically
many people can't even afford a car these days or to fill it with gas
if you insist on in person voting, make it a paid day off
the ID thing is a false narrative, it's not ID that's the problem, it's that it costs money to get the ID and now they want your birth certificate saying the ID doesn't even prove you are a citizen with "realID"
We accept a degree of friction for other constitutional entitlements.
Buying a gun, free speech, right to assembly. Each with caveats.
Appearing in front of your fellow citizens as a breathing person is central to how voting has worked for hundreds of years.
Why change it?
I agree it should be paid day off.
Obtaining an ID card in most developed democracies costs money, sometimes modest fees, sometimes rather hefty fees.
In the US, the 24th Amendment makes it illegal to charge people a tax to vote:
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-24/
> The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.
Any states requiring a particular kind of ID for voting have to make a suitable ID available for free, they cannot charge for it or it becomes a de facto poll tax. That means that while they may accept a driver's license or passport (which cost, at least in every state I know of DLs aren't free), they also have to have some suitable free ID (other than the time to obtain it). But even the time to obtain an ID can become subject to lawsuits against states if they try to play games with it like closing down DMV locations or cutting down on operating hours to make it harder for people to obtain the necessary ID.
You missed the part where registering to vote requires ID in the first place, so the only thing being added are opportunities to deny the right to vote which has already been asserted.
Of course a few rural votes will be rejected, but rest assured plenty more of the urban votes will be rejected too, for a net gain of many rural votes!