2020 Presidential Election

[Faustus]

Back in the 'good old days', I bet the day the Sears Catalogue came out was more of a burden on the USPS than any mail-in ballots would be.

[OldPhiKap]

Maybe I'm over thinking or maybe way off base here, but I think mail in ballots benefit Trump. Looking at the polls I've seen here on DBR, young educated voters are firmly voting for Biden and those youngsters have no problem getting out to vote. However, many of the elderly who favor Trump could have problems. Health issues and the pandemic come to mind. I think Trump is shooting himself in the foot in his efforts to slow down mail-in ballots but like I said, I may be way off base here.

Many in the GOP agree with your analysis.

[CrazyNotCrazie]

I think this is the type of post that is overly partisan. Let's just start with the first sentence of the article...

"President Donald Trump’s yearslong assault on the Postal Service"

Yearslong, so more than a year. Far more than COVID-19 and an expanded interest in mail-in voting.

Trump fancies himself a business man and the Post Office has been historically a very poorly run organization (in my opinion because of Congressional and Presidential meddling but that's a topic for another day). I didn't see any actions in that first article that scream "bad idea". Perpetual overtime is a poor way to manage a business and it is expensive. President after President always tries to streamline, make more efficient and better run. You could easily look up and find articles that have Obama closing post offices, George Bush instituting post office reform and even further back than that.

There are plenty of legitimate issues one can have with Trump, but his "yearslong assault" to deliberately sabotage the Postal System to win the 2020 election is a considerable stretch. Jason has pointed out the Post Office handles a lot of mail on a daily basis and the amount generated by mail-in ballots will not really move their needle.

Others have also pointed out the Republican concern about undermining confidence in mail-in voting when a large portion of Republicans may not feel safe with in-person voting. I think this is a far bigger issue and one that Trump is undertaking without a doubt as part of his 2020 election strategy. I think it highlights part of his "me first" personality. He's not particularly concerned about down ballot Republicans.

Let's see. We are in the middle of a pandemic, thousands of people are dying and though progress is being made, there is no cure in sight. Unemployment is higher than it has been in years. Companies are closing. The government is doing a ton of deficit spending to prop up the economy. Schools are trying to figure out how to reopen to educate our youth. There is a focus on racial issues (whether Trump wants to focus on this or not).

Now is the perfect time to focus the country's attention on the problems with the postal service! The president's job is to focus the country's attention and agenda. Words have meaning. Those who speak have ownership of the words they are saying, even if they are followed by question marks or hedged with "people say..." The amount of bandwidth being wasted on this is clearly a calculated political move to be a CYA to create an excuse in case Trump loses. I think most Americans are smart enough to see right through this, and if anything, it will motivate those who were planning to do mail in voting to send in their ballots a few days earlier to be safe.

[swood1000]

The study that you referenced from Democracy Diverted studied polling place closure from 2012-2018. In the example that you explicitly cited of Harris County, TX, the County Clerk from 2012-2018 was Republican Stan Stanart who was elected in 2010 and 2014. Diane Trautman defeated Stanart in 2018. I don't know how her county wide voting center strategy has affected the election process since 2018 (perhaps it was a mess in 2019 as Skydog stated) but she wasn't in charge of Harris County Elections in the years cited in the study.

My comment was that Trautman was in charge of voting in Harris County on Super Tuesday. Apparently, under her guidance:

Many of the 322,000 Harris County Democratic primary voters who surged to the polls Tuesday faced long lines that forced several balloting sites to stay open late into the evening.

Though Democrats outnumbered Republicans 2 to 1 on Election Day, almost two-thirds of the county’s voting centers were in county commissioner precincts in west Harris County held by Republicans.

And, in a decision that worsened delays, the Harris County Clerk’s Office placed an equal number of voting machines for each party at every voting center. That meant that in Democratic strongholds like Kashmere Gardens, where Republicans were outnumbered 30 to 1 during early balloting, Democratic voters languished in line while GOP machines sat unused.

[OldPhiKap]

91 days until the election. Early voting begins in about 45 days in some states.

[cato]

The concerns over mail service and the impact on voting are valid, IMO. First, on the anecdotal front: a friend of mine recently waited over two weeks to receive a letter. As a result of the ensuing discussion, I learned that her experience was not isolated. Several other people had experienced similar issues, although none so significant. Funny that my tax checks always get delivered promptly, but I digress.

More substantively: Michigan voters are reporting issues with mail service, some not having received their ballots for the primary. https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...988_story.html

[Mtn.Devil.91.92.01.10.15]

The concerns over mail service and the impact on voting are valid, IMO. First, on the anecdotal front: a friend of mine recently waited over two weeks to receive a letter. As a result of the ensuing discussion, I learned that her experience was not isolated. Several other people had experienced similar issues, although none so significant. Funny that my tax checks always get delivered promptly, but I digress.

More substantively: Michigan voters are reporting issues with mail service, some not having received their ballots for the primary. https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...988_story.html

I agree one hundred percent that the concerns are valid. I just think the solution is to buoy the USPS, not to shrug and say "well, so much for that obviously way for people to safely vote."

Any form of voter disenfranchisement should appall all Americans.

[swood1000]

Hate to sound like an OPK echo chamber (great minds think alike?) but I agree. Debates are unlikely to change many minds. And if you think it might change your mind, feel free to hold off voting. There is likely more uncertainty on some down ballot elections, both nationally and locally, so that might also lead people to hold onto their ballots.

Also, as we have discussed several times here, I'm not holding my breath on there actually being debates. The odds that both candidates will agree to a format, who the moderators are, etc. are pretty low.

Election day is three months from today - we're in the final trimester...

Most aspects of the presidential debates are determined by the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). They decide who gets to debate, the debate format, the moderators and the sites. Of course, the candidates themselves could no doubt override this and have the type of debate that they agree on. But if only one of them disagrees with a decision of the CPD it would seem that he or she would have the burden of proving that the CPD's decision is unreasonable.

[CrazyNotCrazie]

Most aspects of the presidential debates are determined by the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). They decide who gets to debate, the debate format, the moderators and the sites. Of course, the candidates themselves could no doubt override this and have the type of debate that they agree on. But if only one of them disagrees with a decision of the CPD it would seem that he or she would have the burden of proving that the CPD's decision is unreasonable.

If I were a gambler I would make you a pie bet that a) all currently scheduled debates do not take place, and b) if they do take place, there will be grumbling by at least one candidate before, during, and/or after the debate(s) that the terms of the debate are not fair. I really hope I am wrong but I am not counting on it. And if the debates do take place, I hope that the moderators are fully enabled to fact check both candidates and repeatedly go back to them until they thoroughly answer all questions in a fully truthful (though who knows what the truth is anymore), responsive manner. But if that were to happen, it would almost definitely lead to the enactment of my clause (b) above.

[Devilwin]

Six weeks later they are still counting in NY election..

[swood1000]

As the Rupert Murdoch-controlled WSJ editorial board said earlier this week — if Trump is more worried about undermining the legitimacy of the election in order to build in an excuse for losing, perhaps he should step aside and let someone run who thinks they can win: https://www.wsj.com/articles/delay-t...on-11596150821

They also said this:

Yet it strikes us as bordering on the fantastic for a media that has reported the extraordinary dislocations of the pandemic—lockdowns, death, virus spikes—to blandly say voting in a major election using the U.S. Postal Service is no problem. ...But Democrats and their allies are doing a disservice to the integrity of this election by being willfully blind to the challenges posed by the pandemic. If the presidential result is close in one or more states amid the kind of problems displayed in New York, either candidate surely will sue, making the Florida “hanging-chads” recount in 2000 look like a kindergarten exercise. Similar challenges are likely to emerge in Senate, House and state elections.

[CrazyNotCrazie]

They also said this:

I'm really about to give up here...

Democrats acknowledge that there is a potential problem with the postal service. They do not think that it will lead to "CORRUPT ELECTION" (not my all caps...). They think that more people will be using the postal service so more resources should be devoted to it. Though as Jason well-documented above, realistically, the incremental impact is not that huge. There have been well-documented (I don't like inserting links as much as you do) efforts recently not to improve mail service but to actually slow it down. I am not dumb enough to think that all of the decade-long problems of the postal service, spanning both Republican and Democratic administrations, can be solved in the next few months. But further starving it of resources and just standing at a podium complaining about the integrity of the election is not going to solve the problem.

We knew this was going to be a problem for a while as the country was already moving towards more mail-in voting. Obama probably should have focused on it as well. The magnitude of this problem has multiplied several times over due to COVID. So let's have a policy and an action plan to do something about it rather than placing blame, setting up excuses and exacerbating the problem.

[Phredd3]

We knew this was going to be a problem for a while as the country was already moving towards more mail-in voting. Obama probably should have focused on it as well. The magnitude of this problem has multiplied several times over due to COVID. So let's have a policy and an action plan to do something about it rather than placing blame, setting up excuses and exacerbating the problem.

This is really the issue. The Postal Service is one of the very few governmental arms that is explicitly named in the Constitution. If there is a problem with that agency, shouldn't the President be addressing the issue productively in consultation with the Congress? What is he doing to SOLVE the problem? Without that, the entire conversation is just pointless complaining.

[MarkD83]

https://facts.usps.com/table-facts/

In 2019 the USPS delivered 143 billion items (billion with a B).

In 2016 138 million (with an m) people voted in the presidential election. 153 million people voted in the 2018 mid-term elections.
Of those 138 million 43 million were mail-in / absentee ballots.

So lets do a little approximation. The USPS was able to handle the 43 million mail-in ballots. That leaves 95 million folks voting in 2016 that voted in person.
If we bump that up since the 2018 election had more voters than 2016 then ~100-110 million people voted in person.
If ALL of these 100-110 million folks vote by mail-in / absentee that is less than 0.7% of the volume that the USPS handled in 2019.

The issue may not be with delivery and pick-up but rather counting the ballots. This may indicate that control is with the states and not the federal government.

[budwom]

yeah, people like to beat up on the USPS, but by and large they do a good job with limited resources...just about everything I've sent and received in the last 30 years has arrived on time, with the exception of some magazines which seem to have wandered off for a week or two...

Also be advised that some major portions of USPS woes have to do with accounting tricks...the attached article is nine years old, but many of the basics still apply...in short, they've been intentionally hampered:
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/con...flna6C10407011

[Acymetric]

They could increase funding, if they actually cared.

Who is "they?"

The government? Could push more funding to the USPS since they are overstressed. Instead of using their overworked nature to not do mail voting.

Maybe hiring part timers to help. But freight gets prioritized. Maybe they figure paying customers are important than paper ballots. And I have seen it happen numerous times while at Fedex..

https://facts.usps.com/table-facts/

In 2019 the USPS delivered 143 billion items (billion with a B).

In 2016 138 million (with an m) people voted in the presidential election. 153 million people voted in the 2018 mid-term elections.
Of those 138 million 43 million were mail-in / absentee ballots.

So lets do a little approximation. The USPS was able to handle the 43 million mail-in ballots. That leaves 95 million folks voting in 2016 that voted in person.
If we bump that up since the 2018 election had more voters than 2016 then ~100-110 million people voted in person.
If ALL of these 100-110 million folks vote by mail-in / absentee that is less than 0.7% of the volume that the USPS handled in 2019.

The issue may not be with delivery and pick-up but rather counting the ballots. This may indicate that control is with the states and not the federal government.

Of course, that volume is spread out across an entire year, and ballots aren't. Likely, mail in ballots will be spread across a couple months but heavily concentrated in the two weeks preceding the election.

[MarkD83]

When anyone in the federal government complains that some other group is fiscally inefficient...they should all be reminded of the following...

https://usdebtclock.org/

None of them are doing a great fiscal job.

[MarkD83]

Of course, that volume is spread out across an entire year, and ballots aren't. Likely, mail in ballots will be spread across a couple months but heavily concentrated in the two weeks preceding the election.

In 2018 the USPS delivered 800 million packages (harder than letters) in December (Christmas rush). The USPS can do a "rush" pretty well...…

The solution to the volume issue in a short period of time may be to start sending out ballots after both conventions are complete and start counting the ballots on Sept. 1.
There would be no constitutional issue since the actual deadline for the final tally would be Nov. 3 (? not sure about this.)

I wonder if this is all within the control of the states?

[swood1000]

Well, the decidedly non-partisan Brookings Institute did a major study of vote-by-mail fraud over the past 20 years and found 29 total fraudulent votes in prominent vote-by-mail states. That's 29 ballots out of about 50 million votes cast in those states over the time of the study.

29...

29!!!

Sorry, I shouldn't shout like that but 29 total fraudulent votes out of 50 million is beyond meaningless. The assertion that vote by mail is beset with fraud is demonstrably false. Now, there could be problems with it if the states throw out a lot of ballots (hello, Georgia!!) for questionable reasoning and if they fail to inform voters that their ballot has been disqualified, but it should be seen as a a non-partisan fact that fraud is not a reason to question vote-by-mail.

Thanks for citing the research. I simply don’t understand the concern with vote-by-mail. IMO, any claim that it’s a risky way to conduct an election is either highly uninformed or willfully ignorant.

On the other hand allowing ballot harvesting, especially where the harvester is legally allowed to sign the voter's name, as in Nevada for disabled, elderly or illiterate voters, does seem to suggest potential problems for voting integrity.

[PackMan97]

Well, the decidedly non-partisan Brookings Institute did a major study of vote-by-mail fraud over the past 20 years and found 29 total fraudulent votes in prominent vote-by-mail states. That's 29 ballots out of about 50 million votes cast in those states over the time of the study.

29...

29!!!

Sorry, I shouldn't shout like that but 29 total fraudulent votes out of 50 million is beyond meaningless. The assertion that vote by mail is beset with fraud is demonstrably false. Now, there could be problems with it if the states throw out a lot of ballots (hello, Georgia!!) for questionable reasoning and if they fail to inform voters that their ballot has been disqualified, but it should be seen as a a non-partisan fact that fraud is not a reason to question vote-by-mail.

Jason, there are majors issues with using known, proven cases of voter fraud. Mainly that in most states it is all but impossible and/or illegal to look for voter fraud. Therefore very few cases are ever prosecuted and fewer result in convictions. If we don't look for it, it can't happen. Perhaps it isn't happening. Perhaps it is. I'm not going to comment on that only that the system is not set up to find voter fraud and therefore does not find voter fraud.

It's a bit like Trump wanting to stop the COVID-19 testing. If we stop testing for COVID-19, our confirmed cases will quickly drop to zero.