Are you going to mail in your ballot by UPS or FEDEX...?

[kentuck]

..If USPS is shut down?

Anything else they can think of to suppress the vote?

[33taw]

1. I will drop it off personally.

[eleny]

22. That's what we do

Plenty of easy drive up options around here. A nearby town's city hall is closer to our house than our city hall. So I just drop it off there. And now our local library branch has a drop box out front.

It couldn't b easier when a state makes the commitment to voting participation.

[MurrayDelph]

24. Me, too.

I live in a town in Oregon where the voting dropbox is two blocks closer to my house than the Post Office is.

[no_hypocrisy]

29. Me too.

Fill out the ballot in the Board of Elections, seal the envelope, and return it. Plus it won't get "lost in the mail."

[dhol82]

2. Well, FedEx runs about $20 for two day delivery.

Don’t know if there’s a cheaper method.
Possibly horse drawn wagon.

[TheBlackAdder]

35. That means FedEx and UPS can't keep leeching off of their Final Segment Delivery Services!

.

That means all of the money those two are saving by having the USPS make house calls goes away. All those tens of millions in congressional payoffs gets FUBARed.

Neither firm has the infrastructure to support many suburban & rural deliveries.

.

[leftieNanner]

3. Oregon has 100% VBM

And we have community drop off boxes everywhere. Mine is three blocks down the hill behind the library.

That being said, we cannot lose the USPS for ANY reason! So I'm going to order some stamps. Since we are locked down anyway, maybe I'll write some paper-and-pen letters and send them to all of my friends. I'm going to have to get out my crayons to make some homemade birthday cards since the card store is closed!

[kentuck]

4. Actually, I think the Postal Service is required by the Constitution?

Seems I read that "somewhere"?

[rzemanfl]

10. Not true. I looked it up. n/t

[kentuck]

13. Probably talking about the "Postal Clause"

Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the United States Constitution, known as the Postal Clause or the Postal Power, empowers Congress "To establish Post Offices and Post Roads".

[rzemanfl]

25. Thank you. I was too lazy to do all those keystrokes. n/t

[Celerity]

31. Congress is not required to establish post offices. It merely has the power to do so.

http://postalnews.com/blog/2015/05/07/postal-myths-it-would-take-a-constitutional-amendment-to-eliminate-or-privatize-the-postal-service/

Here’s what the Constitution actually says in Article 1, Section 8

The Congress shall have Power To establish Post Offices and post Roads

That’s it! You don’t need to be a constitutional scholar, or even a lawyer to interpret that sentence- it’s very clear. Congress is not required to establish post offices. It merely has the power to do so if it chooses to. And it chose to do so in 1792 when it passed the “Postal Service Act”. That Act of Congress established the Post Office Department. All it takes to repeal an Act of Congress is another Act of Congress- not a constitutional amendment.

[rzemanfl]

33. That was the source of my comment. I am so lazy. You have the advantage of youth. n/t

[Celerity]

37. my gran on mummy's side has more energy that you, me and 10 other posters put together

bloody shame she is a wicked old Bajan and it is hate that drives her

[LisaL]

9. Who will bring you this ballot?

[Brother Buzz]

5. How do you receive your mail in ballot if the postal service is shut down?

Asking for a friend.

[kentuck]

7. Good question!

[rzemanfl]

27. Your congressperson will put them in a box outside his/her local office,

like ours did for Florida Unemployment Compensation Applications because the system is broken, libraries are all closed and people without computers and printers are just as fucked as Rick Scott wanted them to be all along.

[Brother Buzz]

42. Oh, that's sweet. I'll pick up a couple up dozen of them because as my pappy used to say.....

"Vote early and vote often"

[luvs2sing]

6. In my county, you can drop them off at the board of elections. nt

[LisaL]

8. If you have to go t board of elections to get your ballot and then go back to drop it off,

you might as well just vote in person.

[2naSalit]

11. Here we can also drop them at a polling place on election day.

[csziggy]

21. Here you can drop them off at any early voting site

Early voting is two weekends and the full week before Election Day - for the presidential primary on March 17, early voting was from Saturday, March 7 through Sunday, March 15. There are 10 locations in our small county, mostly library branches.

I always figure if I've got to go in to turn in a ballot, I might as well vote in person. The scanners used to read our paper ballots will immediately reject any ballot that has a problem - undervote, overvote, or extraneous marks - so that is a check to make sure the ballot is accepted. Plus, now that they have added stylus to put the signature on the little screens, it's quicker to verify them than not being sure if your mail in ballot might be considered invalid.

[2naSalit]

36. I have no idea

how the polls function here as I have always voted by mail in this state.

[csziggy]

40. I grew up when absentee ballots were hard to get here

You had to have a reason. I voted absentee once or twice as a college student living away from home. That was long before the Supreme Court said students could consider their college domicile as their address for voting purposes, but even so I probably would have voted absentee since Mom was a poll worker and arranged for them to be sent to me. It's been so long I don't remember the exact circumstances.

Since getting out of college I have always voted in person and since Florida started early voting I always vote early.

[customerserviceguy]

12. We need Internet voting

Millions of financial transactions are completed everyday, with a minimum of hassle or fraud. Surely twice a year, we can have professionals conduct an election that way.

[kentuck]

14. Don't trust the Internet.

Except as a backup to paper ballots.

We can't even keep DU up all the time.

[customerserviceguy]

16. But mail, you trust?

Ever get anything lost in the mail? My New Yorker magazine from last week still isn't here. It probably went to an elderly neighbor who is too scared to leave the house to put it back in my mailbox. Two weeks ago, I got a magazine for the neighbor across the street, and put it into her mailbox.

Banks have been targets of thieves for god-knows-how-long, and they've figured out how to thwart evildoers who would love to rob them blind.

I'm reminded of people who won't use a credit card on the Internet, but think absolutely nothing of handing that card to a restaurant server who whisks around the corner with it.

[OnDoutside]

30. Can tens of millions of postal votes be hacked as an internet vote can ?

[customerserviceguy]

43. It all comes down

to who is opening the envelopes, and what they do with them. And I've never heard of any Internet vote being hacked, have you?

Way back when I was a kid, they had these big voting machines, there was no paper trail, just levers and gears, and wheels that tallied up votes. Sure, a group verified totals on the machine, but that was "hackable", too.

I look at a world in which millions of online transactions safely and securely take place daily, and I ask myself, "Why don't we handle as many things as possible that way?"

[OnDoutside]

48. Actually there are lots of internet votes everyday that are skewed

and hacked. Here in Ireland, those sort of unverified votes are called Shinner votes, after a political party whose members are notorious for hijacking internet votes to big themselves up or attack another party. I've been a software developer for 35 years, so I'm not a philistine with regards to technology, in fact I love tech/gadgets. Internet voting is open to massive abuse, not just at voting time, but at transmission and tabulating time. And because you don't know it's happening, you may never hear about it.

Paper based voting has it's negatives, in time taken to count but people do generally have confidence in the system, and that matters. Actually the number one Republican tactic is to dissuade and deny people from even getting to vote in the first place. If the current system was so insecure, they wouldn't even bother with voter suppression as much as they do.

[Brother Buzz]

17. I demand a paper trail. Perhaps a hybrid approach with a paper trail would work

Sign up with your Registrar Of Voters, login for a printable number coded ballot, then drop it in a lock box at your city hall, police station, or whatever.

Just an idea.

[customerserviceguy]

18. Or, maybe

have IT professionals handle voting systems, instead of county bureaucrats who went to a quickie seminar on the subject. We have the technology for secure voting, we just refuse to use it.

[Brother Buzz]

19. Our Registrar Of Voters and her staff worked with the go-to IT whiz at the nearby university

He was professor in engineering, but was totally dialed in; he was one of the first persons to raise the red flag on the pitfalls of Black Box voting before it even became an issue.

I have total confidence in the security of my county system.

[Baitball Blogger]

15. Since these are privately owned branches I have no confidence in them at all.

Last edited Sun Apr 12, 2020, 08:17 PM - Edit history (1)

Imagine your right-wing neighbor manning the store. No confidence at all.

[GoCubsGo]

20. I probably won't be able to vote by mail.

My governor has his head so far up Trump's ass, it's buried embedded in Lindsey Graham's ass, who got up there first. The state legislature is controlled by the GOP, so I doubt we'll be allowed mail-in voting. We also have to jump through a ton of hoops to vote absentee. So, I'll likely be donning my mask and voting in person.

[Meowmee]

26. Can it be done by fedex?

If so yes I will ask for a pick up to mail all of ours in. Make sure to make a copy of your ballots and photograph them for proof of voting etc. I did that at the 2018 polling office as well.

[2naSalit]

38. I already do that, just because.

Which is why I like voting by mail since you can't do that in the booth unless you have a camera phone... which I don't.

[Meowmee]

44. Good! Time to get a small camera phone ir just a digital cam 😊

[2naSalit]

45. Phones all come with cameras but I diable them at purchase.

I want a phone that is a phone, I'll accept text but that's as afar as I am willing to allow on my phone. I do have a reasonably nice utilitarian digital camera that I use for artistic purposes but it takes good shots of ballots too. I also make a hard copy. I always vote so I have a file for those.

[Meowmee]

46. Great!

[Arthur_Frain]

28. Last I checked....

FedEx was still non union, except for it’s pilots.

[handmade34]

32. we must not let the USPS fail

the local post office is a social event

[rzemanfl]

34. State and Federal Courts rely on the mail system for a lot of things.

There would be a lot of re-writing going on if the USPS were to disappear.

[2naSalit]

39. I don't see how they can succeed this time around but

it does mean that we will need to reinforce the USPS immediately after inauguration.

[Polybius]

41. I vote in person

Election Day is my Christmas.

[MichMan]

47. USPS is very unreliable right now

Been waiting for over 10 days for a check from Detroit ( 2 hrs away) that hasn't arrived. Packages that are scheduled to arrive in 2 days are taking well over a week. Been happening multiple times on stuff I have mailed and also being mailed to me.

If you check the tracking numbers, they are being sent all over the place with 2-4 days between being received at a regional center and being sent out for the next destination. Things I have ordered sent via UPS or Fed Ex are arriving right on schedule with no side trips or delays.