[nxc18]

The craziest thing about the whole situations is there actually isn’t much evidence that vote by mail favors republicans; and yet they’re willing to degrade postal service to a country more reliant on it than ever, just for a small hope of electoral advantage.

Edit: article in case anyone isn’t convinced (I was skeptical at first, given the tone of the discussion): https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/us/politics/vote-by-mail....

[olliej]

The concern for the GOP isn’t that democrats favor voting by mail, it’s that the GOP has worked hard to make it as hard as possible to vote in person in targeted (eg non Republican) communities.

Widespread vote from mail defeats that as it means that their selective polling closures, and arbitrary barriers to voting in person, go away

[xzlzx]

This is a great point. That makes a lot of sense.

[bobsoap]

Out of curiosity, what are those barriers?

[jeffbee]

The simplest one is just selectively closing polling places, or the related practice of requiring local jurisdictions to fund their own elections, which selectively impacts poorer cities or counties. Next comes voter identification laws which selectively target people who are less likely to have government identification cards (black voters are four times more likely to lack both a drivers license and a US passport compared to white voters). Finally you simply throw ballots from the disfavored precincts directly in the trash. County officials can do this in several ways, by not delivering working machines or official ballots to certain precincts, by forcing precincts to vote on provisional ballots that officials have the authority to ignore, and by subjectively discarding mailed ballots because the signature "doesn't match" according to a non-reproducible process.

[ethanbond]

Photo ID laws is a big one.

Closing polling stations in minority communities.

[_-david-_]

Can you name a first world county that doesn't have voter id laws?

[ethanbond]

How about this: if Republicans were pushing voter ID laws plus a comprehensive plan to get IDs to every American who wishes to vote, I suspect no one would have any problem with such a proposal.

As it stands now, there are large groups of Americans for whom getting a photo ID is a non-trivial task. People without birth records, people who can’t take time off work to go to the DMV, people who don’t know that they go to the DMV to get an ID, people who live hours from the nearest DMV, so on and so forth.

Let’s make sure they all get a chance to vote. Any proposal that aims to do that, I believe, would not have the support of the Republican Party, because the Republican Party is uninterested in increasing voter turnout.

[andrekandre]

> Finally you simply throw ballots from the disfavored precincts directly in the trash.

cant this be done, arguably even easier with mail-in voting?

[_-david-_]

Just to be clear I am in favor of providing free IDs and allowing the use of said ID, a driver's license, passport, etc for voting.

You say that no one would have an issue with such a proposal but then list the argument I have heard from multiple people of why this won't work.

How is someone supposed to get an id without going to the DMV or some other government office? The government doesn't have a picture of everyone so people would be required to go into an office to get one. Some people are unable to go in due to the reasons you list.

[chrisseaton]

In the US why is identity linked to driving - why does the DMV do it? What do people who can’t drive due for proof of identity?

[dane-pgp]

Australia and (most of) the UK:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_Identification_laws#Exam...

[AndrewBissell]

There are other reasons they want to disband the post office beyond just its impact on voting. If they replace it with private entities it becomes easier to surveil and censor the mail, for instance.

[leesalminen]

The USPS takes an image of the front of the envelope for every first class letter sent in the USA. It's a safe bet that they're doing OCR of the recipient/sender addresses and store it in a database. USPS Informed Delivery is just a customer-facing result of that long standing program.

[mindslight]

The USPS includes legal protections against your mail being opened, and a mandate to serve everyone. Whereas private companies can be fully employed for government surveillance (third party doctrine), sell bulk records to commercial surveillance companies (equifax, google, etc), as well as refusing service to whomever they like (ala MC/Visa).

I agree this isn't the overriding concern of those trying to destroy the USPS, but it's surely a nice bonus.

[AndrewBissell]

Yes, the goal of surveillance is already being advanced in many ways under the existing structure of the USPS.

[AnimalMuppet]

There was this incident a while back. Some psychopath sent letters threatening to kidnap young females, rape them, and kill them. He talked about how he had rigged out a van to facilitate this.

His letters got turned over to the FBI, since they would up in different states. Turns out that each stamp has microprinting on it that identifies it. Given the stamp, they were able to identify which post office it was sold at. They guessed at approximately when it was sold, and then from the security cameras they identified the letter writer.

So... explain how private entities are going to do more surveillance?

[AndrewBissell]

Private entities will just have terms of service which say they're entitled to open and inspect your mail for any reason they see fit. mindslight's comment above does a good job of touching on some other ways it will enable more surveillance.

But yes, the postal service has already been turned to this purpose in many ways and the days of "gentlemen don't read each other's mail" are largely over.