The New York Times alerts us (yes, the episode was supposed to be in this post, but there wasn’t space):
“The rate at which mail votes have been rejected for arriving late has ticked up in primaries this year and general elections last year in roughly a dozen states, prompting election officials to worry that the U.S. Postal Service is ill-equipped to deliver ballots in the fall midterms.”
It adds,
“State officials say they worry about the Postal Service’s ability to deliver votes this fall. They are urging voters to mail their ballots early or use drop boxes so their votes count.”
Being disturbed at this revelation, I was hurled into an abyss of worry and concern for our democracy. What could be done to forestall this seemingly unavoidable disaster?
More:
The states studied by The New York Times include some of the most critical battleground House and Senate seats where control of Congress will be determined, as well as key races for governor and secretary of state. The Times obtained data from California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Nebraska, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin and Washington.
In Wisconsin, which hosts an open race for governor, a competitive House election plus contests for both chambers of the state legislature, lateness accounted for about 5,000 rejected mail ballots in the spring primary this year, or 78 percent of all tossed ballots. During the last spring election, in 2023, the figure was roughly 2,300, or 47 percent of all tossed votes.
The increase is particularly striking when comparing primaries in 2024 and this year. In Michigan’s primary earlier this month, more than 10,000 mail ballots were rejected for arriving after the state’s deadline of 8 p.m. on Election Day. That is nearly double the number of ballots rejected in 2024. In Washington, the number of late-arriving mail ballots increased from about 16,000 to more than 20,000 in the same period.
This terrible. I briefly considered hurling myself out of my office window, but then remembered that it was on the first floor. And then, in the depths of despond, while I pondered weak and weary, a sudden, astounding inspiration came to me like a thunderbolt out the blue!
Why not tell voters to actually go to a polling place and vote in person? It’s a perfect solution! Like so many other brilliant moments of perception, from gravity to the knock-knock joke, once someone says it, it seems so obvious and amazing that nobody came up with it long ago.
Thank you, thank you everyone. But I just happened to be the vessel. It was inevitable that someone would come up with the concept.
In person voting!
It’s so crazy, it just might work!
Ethics Alarms 
Forget in-person voting and the postal service. I am writing from the seafloor of the Challenger Deep, where my personal research submarine has become firmly lodged under a particularly judgmental boulder after I attempted a quick scenic detour to photograph a translucent fish that was giving me the evil eye (all six of them). Fortunately, the vessel is upright, the coffee maker still works, and the emergency biscuits are holding strong. I remain optimistic that either the rescue ROV or a very determined giant squid will free me before the election. However, if I don’t surface by then, someone at EA please alert the authorities that I’m voting the Constitution Party straight down the line and to record my votes accordingly.
A very conservative never-Trump friend of mine posted this on Facebook yesterday…
I posted this as a reply…
The USPS has been deteriorating for a while. It was getting so bad back in 2015 that I tested it. I’ve posted this on various blog sites since I performed this test, I think this is the first time I’ve posted it on Ethics Alarms…
I’ve proven to myself that the USPS (at least in my area of Wisconsin) is unreliable enough for me to trust them with anything important.
I encourage everyone to make up your own test for the USPS in your area to see how they perform and make up your own mind if you would use them for anything important.
But even that is tangential to the real issue, which is those are all terrible terrible terrible analogies to voting. People steal checks, yes, but there are no mass efforts to send fake checks to recipients, nor is chain of custody essential in any of those examples: nobody is going to receive a fake license because someone benefits from substituting a fake one for a real one in the mail. None of those are situations where a botched effort affects more than a single person. In fact, your friend is a moron, and you can tell him I said so.
Better analogy: You are on trial for the murder of a young child. The photo surveillance looks a lot like you. You WERE near the crime scene at the time and the cell phone records show your presence. Several eyewitnesses identified you from a lineup.
Would you allow all the DNA evidence, the only thing that can show that it wasn’t you, to be mailed to the lab using USPS 1st class mail? What if the police chief stated that the evidence would be mailed to the lab by personally mailing it at the main city post office on Wednesday? What if the postmaster has personally hated you since high school and has been harassing you with the mail for years?
This is a better analogy. The postal workers union endorses political candidates. They know what the envelopes look like. They know when they go out. They pick up and deliver the mail to people’s houses, houses with cars with political bumper stickers and political signs. There are numerous reports of postmasters and union reps telling postal workers to ‘lose’ ballots to or from certain houses.
Yes. Excellent.
None of these people seem to ask, Do you trust Trump’s USPS to keep your ballot secure?
A lefty friend of mine posted the same meme. My response was as follows:
<ital>Seems to me that this meme conflates two different issues.
If the issue is “can we be reasonably certain that the ballot will actually be delivered to its intended destination,” then the answer is that yes, it’s probably safe.
If the issue is “can we be reasonably certain that the ballot was, at all times, under the control of the registered voter assigned that ballot and filled out by that individual,” then the answer is no – without a verification process, there’s no way to be certain.</ital>
By the way, this is A.I.M.’s birthday!
Aw shucks.
English — Happy Birthday!
Czech — Všechno nejlepší knarozeninám!
Spanish — ¡Feliz cumpleaños!
French — Bon anniversaire!
German — Alles Gute zum Geburtstag!
Italian — Buon compleanno!
Portuguese — Feliz aniversário!
Swedish — Grattis på födelsedagen!
Russian — С Днём рождения!
Indonesian — Selamat ulang tahun!
Dutch — Gefeliciteerd met je verjaardag!
Finnish — Hyvää syntymäpäivää
Norwegian — Gratulerer med dagen!
Polish — Wszystkiego najlepszego!
Turkish — Doğum günün kutlu olsun!
Danish — Tillykke med fødselsdagen!
Israeli — יום הולדת שמח (Yom Huledet Sameach).
Arabic — عيد ميلاد سعيد” (Eid milad saeed)
Mandarin Chinese — 生日快乐 Shēngrì kuài!
Sanskrit — शुभं जन्मदिनम्
Greek — χρόνια πολλά
Hindi — जन्मदिन की शुभकामनाएँ (janmadin kee shubhakaamanaen)
Inuktituk — ᐅᓪᓗᒥ ᓇᓕᐅᑎᑦᓯᐊᕆᑦ (ullumi naliolettsiart)
Japanese — お誕生日おめでとう (Otanjōbiomedetō)
Vietnamese — Chúc mừng sinh nhật
Hawaiian — Hauʻoli Lā Hānau
Latin — Beatus Natalis
And of course:
Pig Latin — AppyHay IrthdayBay
PWS
Show Off ……
AnkThay OuYay…
PWS
Because everyone deserves someone with blue hair singing something really annoying to you on their birthday.
Enjoy! 😈
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wcOAXB1hO00
Or we could just do chickens.
Steve; was this posted by the pig-headed I’m thinking it was?
PWS
A mutual aquaintence.
Who needs mail-in voting when states like Virginia have in-person voting for the November election starting on SEPREMBER 18th!!! Good grief…why vote so early and miss any October Surprises candidates have in store for us. Maybe it’s to give more opportunities to stuff the drop boxes. Does anyone need a month and a half to figure out how to get to their local polling place?!
Jack wrote…
My sarcastic response is…
Yup, this vote in-person idea will never fly due to the fact that so many weak minded people in our country have been indoctrinated with constant propaganda and now they’re delusional.
Why did the chicken cross the road?
… to vote – because voter ID was not required.
Yes and make it obligatory to come on a particular day. Not throgh out an entire season.
Declare election day to be a federal holiday. ‘Encourage’ employers to make a few hours available for each employee to leave to vote that day.
I also think we need to have a serious discussion about who should be allowed to vote.
(1) People in memory care facilities should not be allowed to vote. And NO, their relatives don’t get to ‘vote for them’.
(2) Felons should not be allowed to vote at least for a period of time. I do believe we have too many felonies, so this one is tied into that issue.
(3) No ‘conflict of interest’ voting. I am tired of seeing that my taxes just went up because we had a special election that wasn’t mentioned by any news media and the only notice was a flyer in the hallway of city hall and in every teacher’s lounge in the city. In a city of 35,000, having a special election to pass a bond issue for some school boondoggle and watching it pass 433 to 112 because every schoolteacher was released from school that day and told to vote for it is irritating. Oh, and the schools DO tell the teachers how to vote. So…
(a) No one gets to vote for an issue if they work for that level of government. City employees don’t get to vote on city issues. State employees don’t get to vote on state issues. Federal employees don’t vote in federal elections. School employees don’t get to vote on school issues.
(b) No voting by dependents. If you are getting unearned benefits (SNAP, Section 8, etc), you shouldn’t be voting in elections that determine those benefits. If you want to vote, stop living off the taxpayers. (You have to pay into unemployment and SS, those aren’t unearned benefits).
(4) Voting registration expires after 5 years like driver’s licenses. This should help keep the voter rolls clean.
I do realize that this will complicate voting, but I think these conflicts of interest are too large to ignore anymore. DOGE found that roughly 80% of federal spending is waste and fraud. That is waste and fraud by the employees. In my state, a special DHS ‘czar’ eliminated $100 million in spending by laying off employees without affecting any of the agencies services at all. When asked “Do you mean to tell me that we had $100 million of extra employees not doing anything at the state Department of Human Services?” the czar replied “No, but I was only authorized to eliminate $100 million (15% of the budget).”We need to get rid of vast amounts of government employees and the conflict of interest inherent in that means that we can’t do what is necessary. Government employees are 25% of the workforce in my state.
“Like so many other brilliant moments of perception, from gravity to the knock-knock joke, once someone says it, it seems so obvious and amazing that nobody came up with it long ago.”
Knock Knock.
Who’s there?
Mail-in voter.
Mail-in voter who?
Exaaaaaaactly . . . .
–Dwayne