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My dad had an address in Morgantown, Indiana, and the fact that he lived several miles south, over the county line and past antother small town, always made it pretty clear to me that he didn't live in Morgantown. Likewise, if you live in another state, there's little confusion because state lines appear on maps and are well marked on all major roads. Businesses and individuals are responsible for knowing which state they reside in and paying the appropriate taxes, regardless of where their mail is sorted. As for elections, electoral districts don't generally align with city limits in the first place, so this has to be sorted out by the election registration system based on the full address in most cases anyway. As for what city name appears in legal documents, the answer is that "preferred" doesn't mean "mandatory". A warrant to search the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, 4790 W 16th St, Speedway IN, 46222, would be perfectly valid, despite the fact that the USPS prefers mail to be addressed to "Indianapolis" rather than "Speedway". For there to be any possibility of confusion, you'd need to have two distinct locations, whose identical addresses share a ZIP code, and differ only by city name, which for obvious reasons the postal service will not allow. |
Re: legal documents: there are less severe cases than warrants that I would expect to trip a lot of people up, which is what I'm wondering more about. Example:
ZIP code 97635 is apparently in both Oregon and California. The post office for both sides of the border appears to be in New Pine Creek, OR 97635. So if someone provides you with that address, you would quite naturally assume they're in Oregon. And you might collect taxes, record calls, or sell their personal data based on that. But whoops! Turns out they're actually in California, so you just broke a bunch of privacy laws on top of missing tax payments to California, in some cases potentially risking criminal penalties.
Wouldn't this trip a lot of people up, especially for smaller entities? I can understand multi-billion-dollar businesses having this all handled correctly, but for individuals or smaller businesses, wouldn't it completely throw them off and potentially subject them to criminal penalties? (How) would people deal with this?