You can also check your state and county elections web sites to see if they have official ballot boxes that voters can drop their absentee ballots into before election day.
I get hardly any mail. But since COVID I am only getting mail delivery every other day or so. Have no idea why the mail stopped coming. Doesn’t seem to be any particular schedule
Mine is the same. Packages get to my local USPS hub and then disappear. This has been happening for years. When I contacted USPS about it, they said that the problem is old machines and new employees. They offered no solution to the problem, nor did they suggest what they were doing to try to fix it.
So, I track my packages to that facility, then cross my fingers and hope that it moves on from there instead of falling into oblivion.
USPS and UPS are probably Covid challenged like many industries. Amazon only recently started what I’d consider “real” prime deliveries in my philly suburb…around 2-4 days. For the previous 3+ months it was closer to 2 weeks.
I drop off my mail in ballot since there’s no way to track it thru the post office.
So, it not just us! We seem to get no mail delivered 1-2 days a week. I started hearing about the postal service slowdown and thought- aha!
I’ve had zero issues with Amazon throughout the pandemic. Honestly, their delivery team is the best IMO.
Also had zero issues with delivery form Target and Walmart. But none of those packages are coming via USPS.
Elizabeth Warren retweeted this: “The Postal Service has informed states that they’ll need to pay first-class 55-cent postage to mail ballots to voters, rather than the normal 20-cent bulk rate. That nearly triples the per-ballot cost.”
yeah, I get the potential issue with ‘saving money’ by eliminating OT. According to a USPS union rep, ~20% of mail is handled in overtime.
But, even before COVID, regular mail has been declining (as many folks go to auto-pay for regular bills). There are many days that we only receive junk mail. (Congress should allow us to opt out of THAT to save paper!) More importantly, since first class mail – the most profitable – has been declining for 20 years, the Service should need fewer work hours, not more.
https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/first-class-mail-since-1926.htm
re: voting by mail. This is primarily a state problem, as several states have been voting by mail in significant numbers for years, successfully. Oregon is exclusively vote-by mail. CA processes a large number of ‘absentee’ ballots every election (60+%). New York’s recent fiasco is on them.
However, if mail delivery becomes significantly slower or less reliable, that is an additional problem that is not caused by how the states run absentee voting by mail.
We vote by mail in Colorado and there are zero issues. They mail the ballots out about 3 weeks in advance, you have 2 weeks to mail them back in OR until 7pm on election day to drop them in one of the many many ballot boxes anywhere in the state, no postage required. You can look up all the candidates at home, fill out the ballot and drop it off. There is a ballot box outside my polling place so no reason to wait in line. There is never a line anymore as the only people who go inside are those who didn’t receive a ballot (homeless? moved?) or someone needing to register.
NY regulations require a postmark. NY bulk mailed ballots and bulk mail can, by postal regulations, be delivered whenever it is convenient. NY also used a meter return postage, which doesn’t get a postmark so no way to tell if the ballots were mailed by election day. Colorado requires ballots to be received by 7 pm on election day. Mailed it in late? Too bad. Sec of State doesn’t care when you mailed it, it has to be received by 7 pm. NY might want to look at changing their rule.
I mailed 3 envelops with masks in them (so count as a package) on Tues. from Denver. One was going to the next county, two were to the east coast. Next county was to be delivered today but for some reason it went from Denver to St. Paul MN and was back in Denver at 9:30 this morning. I don’t think it will get there today.
Of the other two, one to NYC and one to CT, they took a little vacation too. One also went to St Paul and in now closing in on NYC. The other went to a mail distribution center in Wisconsin and is now in CT Both were scheduled to be delivered on Monday and I think they’ll get there.
Two weeks go I mailed a priority mail box ($16) on a Monday. It was supposed to be there Friday, July 24. It also took a vacation on the Maryland eastern shore and was delivered on Tues after seeming to go to random places. So much for priority mail and getting there by the birthday.
So I live in an area of Chicago that for years has been labeled like the worst post office zip code… But after years of arguing with them we finally have a normal full time letter carrier!!! But the amount we are getting is very low. Skipped days sure but some days they delivered twice a day…
I did mail in ballot but in my state we can drop off our own ballot to certain locations. This is what I am doing. Not trusting the mail service if I don’t have to. See if you can drop your ballot off in your state
Sorry, we are nesting so many comments…
“Call our congresspeople and senators and tell them what?
The postal service has to cut costs if they are to survive long term. The old formula doesn’t work anymore in the age of electronic communication.”
[quote=“NJCity”]
That this sudden and deliberate disruption of the constitutionally mandated postal service (service, not business) isn’t acceptable.
Corrected in post #18 to be “between “ 30 and 75 million in postal service competitors, not “and”
I ordered something recently. The vendor sent it by a UPS-USPS hybrid method (UPS delivers it to the USPS for local delivery). Tracker showed that it was accepted by the USPS but then nothing beyond that; the package never arrived.
On the other hand, the replacement order sent the same way was delivered. Another order from a different vendor was sent by USPS and arrived in two days.
It’s a pandemic, folks, and an election year. Of course it’s an issue. Voter suppression tactics or not, it’s a heck of a poor time to be making changes that slow down mail service.
It has been good here. Packages that I have sent are timely (I click n ship and drop into the box in the PO). I sent an envelope with masks that got into the naughty box and the ? Who I don’t know at the post office bureaucracy phoned my DD about it and when she said it was masks, they just delivered it to her instead of returning it to me. Note to self, 4 masks are fine in an envelope with stamps, 8, not so much if they move around.
Yes, here in San Francisco, we have had no problems with the USPS. Amazon has been a bit quirky though.
Pretty clear that just about everyone prefers mail-in voting.
Rural red America relies on the USPS to deliver things like their prescriptions. Interfering with the USPS will hurt red states more than blue ones.
@Sybylla, I put my masks in a plastic ziplock bag and squeeze the air out. I’ve had no problem with that being treated as an envelope until one with four was declared a package and the recipient had to pay add’l postage. It had had four 55 cent stamps on the envelope, which would have covered 9 oz.
As for deliveries, I’ve had issues getting envelopes from MD to eastern GA. Takes 10 days lately. There are two distribution centers in Atlanta from what I understand, and the one that forwards to Augusta is really slow now. OTOH, a fabric order from OK sent priority arrived in two days.
We took a drive yesterday in rural MD on backcountry roads. Saw all those farms and homes along the roads and not a PO, pharmacy or grocery store within 30 miles. As someone whose chemo meds come via mail order, I feel this issue acutely.
Our letter carrier is still leaving dog biscuits in our box. <3