Is voting by mail safe? U.S. Post Office plays important role in elections
The U.S. Postal Service does more than move bits of paper.
Mail service is so important to morale in the U.S. Armed Forces that letter and parcel delivery is one of the first logistical items set up for service members, no matter how far from home.
Founding father Benjamin Franklin was named the first postmaster general, a year before the Declaration of Independence was drafted.
Then and now the postal service is seen as an essential component of democracy, a common thread binding the nation together.
Early transportation advances were subsidized by mail contracts roads, steamships, railroads and airplanes.
When a reliable service is created, other businesses and government services are built around it. Early in the history of the nation, newspapers were offered discounted postage to allow for the widespread distribution of information — and flourished.
Jury services and motor vehicle departments base much of their contact on mail. Our personal identification and emergency services use postal addresses to locate us.
Marketing services use zip codes to sell to customers.
Though attempts have been made to automate the Postal Service, the variety of mail makes for exceptions.
When one of my former co-workers took a job in Hawaii, and sent his two-week notice written on a coconut, with the proper postage, to the editor.
Many functions once exclusively handled by U.S. Mail are now transacted through the internet. There are dozens of online options for text, document delivery and payments, undercutting the Postal Service.
Competition for delivery service has also increased over the years.
There are several package and document delivery options but their service is weak or non-existent on routes that don’t turn a profit, leaving the local post office to pick up the slack.
Delivering mail is a human process. Those costs are fixed but there are benefits.
In places where walking postal delivery is still the norm the letter carrier can be the first person to get help to someone in need.
Where mail is picked up at the post office, that becomes a community hub for information.
Being a postal worker is a physically active job. Many roles are union organized and labor disputes are part of the history.
One political party complains of waste in the post office but it strains credibility to argue waste is the issue. The same party is silent when a new expensive border wall falls down at the first sign of heavy weather.
With an upcoming election, voting by mail is being offered as a safe alternative to in-person voting during the coronavirus pandemic.
Not only are voters concerned, polling places are usually staffed by volunteers from high risk populations.
Today, voting by mail is under attack — often by people who rarely vote in person.
If election security was truly an issue an election reform bill passed by Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives has been on the desk of the Republican Senate Majority leader since March 2019.
If the Republican-controlled Senate wanted to fix the perceived flaws in the bill, they would hold hearings, pass their version and iron out differences in conference committee.
The concern about election security can be measured by the number of Senate hearings they have held, 0.
Studies show that no decided advantage falls to either party via vote by mail.
Early in my career the popular wisdom was that absentee ballots favored Republican voters, but that has become a popular option for Democrats and Independent voters too.
Vote by mail enables young independent voters to participate in higher numbers than before. The party best at appealing to those voters and organizing gets the benefit of absentee ballots.
To win, politicians of all parties would need to do a better job of representing all voters not just a narrow base.
The conservative Washington Times carried an editorial stating voter fraud is extremely rare.
A Brennan Center memo said that across the United States there were four documented cases of voter fraud in 2016 and that it was more likely an American “will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.”
The National Weather Service statistics bear this out, with an average of 49 people killed each year by lightning, and hundreds injured.
The conservative Heritage Foundation uses a broad definition to study the issue.
So far in 2020, the foundation has logged a total of four criminal convictions for election-related crimes in California. But those crimes didn’t involve voter fraud in the sense that President Trump is using the term.
Three convictions were for collecting false signatures on petitions for ballot measures. One was for falsifying six voter registration forms. All resulted in prison or jail sentences.
Voting is a painstaking process and elections are too important to trust to black-box software.
The health of voters, poll workers and the security of the election can all be met.
And voting by mail is not new to San Luis Obispo County. Here, the 2016 presidential election set a record for the number of vote-by-mail ballots processed.
In the event that election results are close and challenged, they can be recounted, audited and verified by a panel that includes Independents, Republicans and Democrats at the local clerk recorder’s office.
On July 14, the new head of the postal service enacted new regulations that drastically slow service, including prohibiting overtime.
That leads to the question: Who benefits from a weakened postal service on the eve of an election that may need to rely on postal delivery like never before?
