Save the USPS - Hackdot

Re:Save the USPS by chrisco255 on Friday August 14, 2020 @12:51AM (#24153634)

He wants to make it harder to vote by mail to prevent fraud, not to create it. You know, elections sometimes come down to a few hundred votes. You think the USPS should control the outcome of an election based on how many parcels they misplace? Or how many dead people vote? Or how many non-citizens vote? Or whether a box of ballots in a republican heavy or Democrat heavy area is left behind? It would be trivial to fuck with this system. The last election it was difficult to convince people that Russian bots were not a factor in the election. People were convinced that $100K in social media ad spend were enough to shift an election. Now all of a sudden mail in paper ballots are a bulletproof way to run a democracy.

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Re:Save the USPS by joshAg on Friday August 14, 2020 @01:00AM (#24153748)

“They need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo. “If they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.”

“If we don’t make a deal that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting. They just can’t have it. Sort of a crazy thing,”

He is explicitly trying to remove the USPS's ability to handle voting by mail.

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Re:Save the USPS by chrisco255 on Friday August 14, 2020 @01:32AM (#24154049)

No I read the postmasters comments. Parcel volume is way down for the post office while packages are up. They are reallocating resources for handling more packages. The USPS parcel business has largely been reduced to junk mail that no one wants.

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Re:Save the USPS by joshAg on Friday August 14, 2020 @02:18AM (#24154349)

We're not talking about what the postmaster said. We're not talking about parcel volume. We're not talking about package volume. We're not talking about resource reallocation.

We're talking about what trump said.

Trump said the post office needs two bills that fund it to be passed for it to be able to adequately handle universal vote by mails, and if he doesn't make a deal with the people trying to pass those bills, then the post office doesn't get the money it needs to be able to do that:

>>> “If we don’t make a deal that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting. They just can’t have it. Sort of a crazy thing,” Trump said on Thursday.

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Re:Save the USPS by geofft on Friday August 14, 2020 @01:18AM (#24153914)

> He wants to make it harder to vote by mail to prevent fraud, not to create it.

This is technically correct, the best kind of correct. If 100 people actually vote for Smith and 101 people actually vote for Jones, and you count 99 of the votes for Smith and 98 of the votes for Jones, you have not counted any fraudulent votes.

The test of a democracy is whether it is representative, not whether it counts only non-fraudulent votes. Avoiding fraud is a very important means to the end, but it is not the end itself.

Here is an analogy for the HN crowd: If my site is broken, and I need to do a deploy to fix it, and we have a rule that says that every commit must pass tests and tests take 4 hours to run, then great, the rule is making sure that no code that's failing tests hit prod - but the rule is certainly not helpful in bringing prod back online. The rule is a means to the goal of making sure that prod works. It's a good rule, of course. Nobody is questioning the merit of testing your code or saying that untested code is a good thing. But you cannot justify missing your SLAs by saying "All of our code needs to be tested in order for us to know that our site works."

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