I don't think that mail in ballots will significantly affect the USPS. They do about half a billion mail items per day. Ballots for everyone who is registered to vote is mabye 200 million. Ballots are also small. Packages take much more time to handle by the mail carrier.

The point is that mail-in ballots are time-sensitive and the USPS has already fallen behind on its current workload.

I've seen tweets of e-tailers saying some packages (very small+light first class... the kind that are only cost effective thru USPS) are taking weeks when they used to take 1-4 days.

Unless USPS magically becomes more efficient in the next 100 days, their backlog of work will grow and non-prioritized deliveries will fall further behind. It will especially hurt voting is Amazon (or other packages) have higher delivery priority than ballots and ballot materials (usually 4+ items per voter per election).

Delivery is based on routes, which are designed to take 8 hours to fulfill on average. If there's a heavy parcel day, bad weather, coverage for sick workers, etc, the 8 hours may be 11 hours.

Now, they stop working after 8 hours in most cases and leave whatever is left in a pile to be done later. Just like with computers, when you develop a backlog in a system optimized for throughput, things tend to get worse.

Critically, mail in ballots are generally not accepted late. USPS will get everything where it's going eventually - but if the Trump appointee announces an impromtu postal holiday the week before the election then

1. Probably nothing technically illegal has happened

2. Nobody's mail-in-vote will arrive in time to be counted

This coupled with the fact that those rabid Trump fans will be showing up at the polls in person might[1] be enough to tip it in his favor.

1. It still might not be enough though, he is doing hilariously abysmally in polls.

As Wisconsin demonstrated, the attempts at voter suppression will likely backfire. If the Republicans had agreed to mail-in balloting or a delayed primary, they might have held on to the state supreme court seat they lost, but what they ended up doing kept Republican voters home (why go vote in person in a pandemic when there's no top of the ballot choice to make) while the Democrats stood in line (between the obvious attempt to make them stay home [Streisand effect] and the real impact of their top of the ballot choice). I'm just some schmuck in another state and I could see the likely outcome of the attempt at voting suppression before it happened, but Republicans seem to have only two tools in their toolbox anymore: tax cuts and voter suppression, and those tools aren't doing the job now and hurt more than help.

Doesn't your mail in ballot just need to be postmarked by election day to count? Its not the day its received, its the day its sent that counts.

probably depends on the state?

Not sure about USPS specifically, but our canada post is just finally catching up now.

They explained it was basically christmas holiday load, without the extra staff, with less staff on a non busy time (people taking covid related time off for sickness and family).

While I definitely had a couple packages arrive late in the April/May timeframe, since June I've had a couple packages actually show up before the delivery date Canada Post gave.

Yea since June definately been better.

Seems they caught up on international (from china) customs backlog.

Ordered in March, came early June.

Recent ordered in July, got china package in 2 weeks

You'd have to be pretty crazy to actually mail your mail-in ballot. What is the only way to expose every election in the country to the meddling of the federal executive branch? Interpose the USPS between the voter and local election officials! Whether by incompetence or malice they'll find a way to fuck it up. I intend to carry my own ballot to the county election office.

That's fine for you but that's not saying much because that approach is not at all scalable.

Wait, why? It scales at least as well as in-person voting.

Welp, I'm an out-of-country voter personally. I can't really walk 3000 miles.

When I lived abroad I delivered my ballot to my nearest consulate. I understand they are just putting it in the mail, of course.

Except in areas that use more polling stations than they have county election offices.

In California at least, you can drop your mail-in ballot off at a polling station.