https://www.markpack.org.uk/159114/leaflets/

Once you figure that out, it makes sorting the mail real quick. Never has standard ever been important, even if it comes from a company that I do business with.

But for the life of me, I have not been able to figure out the price of a Standard stamp. USPS sells stamps online, but you'd think it would be easier to find the price, but still I can't find it. I would love to know how much is spent on mail that no one really cares about.

Either way, it’s not in USPS’ hands since Congress would have to change that requirement.

This will clearly hurt them in statewide elections, but I wonder how it plays out in local rural elections. I can imagine the rejected ballots leaning more blue than average in heavily red areas.

I can also imagine the opposite: Older folks have less mobility on average, and are probably more likely to mail the ballots in. The Propublica article doesn't say anything about this, but I imagine some election officials track it.

Their ID requirements in Ohio blew back a similar way a few years ago. They made it extremely hard to vote without a driver's license, thinking it'd hit college kids, but it mostly hit retirees that no longer drive.

This just isn't true and has never been true. You can see the requirements here:

https://www.ohiosos.gov/elections/voter-ID-requirements

I'm not sure when you are talking about, but I have family that's voted in Ohio for decades and this was never an issue.

"It's almost like the republicans would be better off if they paid attention to their constitutional duties instead of just burning things down."

The problem is that Democrats won't do ANYTHING to stop potential cheating and then act dumb when you bring up actual ways to exploit the system.

Example one: Ballot harvesting. Judges allowed ballot harvesting in many states leading up to the Trump election, even though it is illegal. They also ignored signature verification rules during this time.

Example two: Voter ID. In every country in the world, you need ID to vote. Democrats have pushed to completely remove it for years.

Example three: Mail-in voting. Mail-in voting is fine. It should be setup so you need to request it for each election. It's too easy to get ballots for people that never wanted to vote in the first place and send it in. Reddit and social media have made it pretty easy to coordinate with strangers.

Example four: We've had a decade of voting machine vulnerabilities and exploits at Def Con and somehow all of the leading security researchers ignored this and/or removed mention of it on social media after the 2020 election. I witnessed Tweets getting deleted in realtime.

Trump originally proposed sane and reasonable protections, and those were squashed by Democrats. This is the result.

Ignoring these problems isn't helping our Democracy, even though you somehow think it gives your side an advantage.

If Trump lost by 200000 votes and claimed "There were 210000 illegal votes!", wouldn't it be easy to present at least one? But they'd scrape the bottom of the barrel of "evidence" in court for one count of fraud...

And Donnie, if you knew the exact number (which is oddly the number you lost by, plus a little bit), doesn't that mean you tallied all the fraudulent votes, well, where's the list then?

Before the 2020 election Trump primed his base by claiming over and over again that he could only lose if the election was rigged. Then, immediately after the 2020 election results were tallied, he and every right-wing media outlet spent the bulk of their airtime announcing that the election was stolen. It comes as no surprise that a significant fraction of the Republican voter base started to believe it was true, despite multiple investigations and dozens of court challenges about fraudulent votes failing to produce any evidence.

It's also not surprising that a significant fraction of the Republican base believes election fraud in general is rampant, which conveniently allowed Republican legislatures to make sweeping changes to how future elections would be held... like their standard voter suppression fare of closing polling locations, removing large blocks of voter registrations without notice, slowing processing of mail-in ballots and changing the rules regarding postmarks and late ballots, adding ID requirements, and, in some cases, revoking the validity of existing IDs.

All while the reality is that only around 1:10^6 votes are ever substantiated as fraudulent (e.g., Arizona has proven 36 cases of voter fraud among 42 million votes cast over the last 25 years).

See: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-widespread-is-electio...

Would just like to point out that here in .au you don’t need ID to vote (as in to show up and cast your vote, not talking about registering).

But it is considered vital that every citizen gets the chance to vote including homeless people so they had to find a compromise. Although ofcourse the number of hobos who want to vote is largely theoretical.

Donald Trump and the current Republican Party does not care about anything other than winning at all cost. And if they don’t win, they will cry like Little Lord Fauntleroy.

I just voted early in Ohio a few days ago and that same list is hanging from the wall, no drivers license needed

Local deliveries used to be overnight; now they take up to a week. Transnational deliveries can take months.

I hope the primary effect of this will be that millions of MAGA votes go uncounted this year and in 2028, because they're the ones that voted for this in the first place.

"I hope the primary effect of this will be that millions of MAGA votes go uncounted this year and in 2028, because they're the ones that voted for this in the first place."

With all of the cheating and dirty tricks from the Democrats (picking the same name as your opponent to confuse voters), I hope the Democrats never take power again.

That's false. The USPS has raised postal rates a number of times in the past several years, without requiring Congressional approval. Hell, they literally just increased rates less than a month ago. https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2026/0825-...

With all of the cheating and dirty tricks from the Democrats (picking the same name as your opponent to confuse voters),

LOL the best and only example you can come up with is the one legal "trick" the Democrats did, and they got the idea from the Republicans. In 2024, Republicans encouraged two guys with the same name as the WA state attorney to run against him in the gubernatorial election. It didn't work then, and the only reason it would work now is if Alaska voters are too illiterate to read the "Republican" in the incumbent's candidate name box on the ballot.

Meanwhile, the GOP DOJ keeps trying to take away the voting rights with knowingly false claims that U.S. citizens are illegal immigrants, even after an analysis showed that more than half of the names on their list were U.S. citizen and the remainder were never registered to vote. https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/doj-california-...

Keep your MAGA propaganda on 8chan where it belongs.

Sure seems like this ranked choice voting solves a lot of problems over the first past the post style we mostly do.

You apparently don't realize that this is not something new, Republicans have done the same thing. So do you hope Republicans also never take power again?

Here's the ballot that some suggest would confuse voters: https://ballotpedia.org/Alaska_official_sample_ballots,_2026

A bold allegation, which, if untrue, renders your question moot

Also, this is nothing new, republicans did it too and non a peep of complaint.

It apparently has one small mistake though, because it says the postal regulatory commission (PRC) sets rates, while the PRC website says they only set rate limits and the USPS sets their own rates [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_posta...

[1] https://prc.gov/who-sets-postal-rates

* https://www.propublica.org/article/mail-ballot-delays-postal...

https://www.savethepostoffice.com/rto-n2024-1/

It's so frustrating. If I want to mail something out, it sits for over a day in the local post office. Even Priority Mail Express can no longer get something out locally overnight. If I need overnight service, I have to drive a significant distance to get to a UPS station to get something into the network.

If something mis-sorts to the wrong post office, it sits for over a day at that remote post office before it can re-enter the stream.

I have had more and more late and missorted packages that compound the late deliveries and all I want to do is cry that I can't get the mail anymore in a reasonable fashion.

Ditto public schools, roads, phones, and broadband (sorta).

1: show up at polling location, either on voting day or within the early voting period.

2: show ID to poll worker who verifies it and hands over the ballots for the elections in which you have the right to vote

3: fill in the ballots, put them in the envelope(s) and hand these over to a poll worker

4: poll worker checks again whether you have voting rights for the specific elections and drops the envelopes into the correct voting urns

Done. No postal service involved. You can vote at any (early) voting location for national elections, for local ones you'll need to go to a local voting location where the required ballots are available. Early voting can start a few weeks before election day so nearly everyone should have the possibility to set aside half an hour to an hour to do their civic duty.

That leaves those who really can't make it to the polls. For these people there can be a verified postal ballot system, i.e. they get one sent home on request, fill it out and send it back in the required envelopes. Voting by mail always adds risks but since it would only be needed for a small fraction of the voters that risk is manageable. Mail-in votes need to be counted on election day so they need to be in the mail about a week before election day. Why you ask? Because the fraud risk of mail-in ballots makes it all too easy to use them to add enough votes to push a close race towards a specific candidate. Count them early on election day and publish the results, these need to be final results, before the rest of the votes are counted. There's plenty of countries where votes are counted this way, this is not rocket science. I have voting rights in 2 different countries in northern and western Europe, both use something resembling this scheme. Everyone shows his or her ID either to get the ballots or to have them deposited in the voting urns, this has never been contested and the mere thought of voting without ID is so clearly outrageously silly that nobody brings it up. All the arguments against showing ID have been proven to be specious at best, you need ID to do just about anything related to the government so insisting on voting without it only serves to undermine trust in elections.

it's a constitutional right, not something you should have to jump through hoops

people don't have the time to take off work and not get paid and wait in line for hours which is exactly what many places do now by reducing voting location radically

many people can't even afford a car these days or to fill it with gas

if you insist on in person voting, make it a paid day off

the ID thing is a false narrative, it's not ID that's the problem, it's that it costs money to get the ID and now they want your birth certificate saying the ID doesn't even prove you are a citizen with "realID"

It's a database query to generate a list of eligible voters and where they can vote. Literally.

Bonus points for maintaining 50+ heterogeneous legally separated voter registration databases. Thereby maximizing the likelihood of errors. Plus every VRDB has one or more teams of saboteurs; purging eligible voters, monkey wrenching, and sowing FUD.

...it's almost as if the there's some far reaching, widespread campaign to disenfranchise voters.

Buying a gun, free speech, right to assembly. Each with caveats.

Appearing in front of your fellow citizens as a breathing person is central to how voting has worked for hundreds of years.

Why change it?

I agree it should be paid day off.

But those same people who don't want their first and second amendment rights to be infringed are okay with voting having high friction so a lot of people can't do it.

There simply is no meaningful intentional voter fraud in the US.

To all those who reacted with 'ID required to register to vote': you're missing the part where the postal services need to get involved to deliver ballots which this article is about. You're also missing the part where 'registering to vote' does not mean the ballot is filled in by the person registered to vote, let alone the part where voter rolls are heavily polluted with people who moved or died still registered at an address to which ballots get delivered. You know this to be the case, you've seen the reports on the voter rolls, you may even have received ballots for people who used to live on your addresses. Denying it doesn't make it go away. Maybe that's the point? It is getting harder and harder to take the reasons to refuse voter ID at face value given that, as said, this is the way it works in a large part of the world. Checking ID at the polling location is normal in most countries. It is the sane and smart thing to do, never mind the bollocks excuses The Party makes up against it. Once person, one vote (per election), close to guaranteed.

Signs point to "no".

Somehow folks who call for voter ID laws seem to also be opposed to making getting a photo ID free and easy

-1. Give everyone an ID. Actually give them one and don't just pretend to do it.

You're not even wrong.

I worked as a poll judge for a long time. Most every jurisdiction has required ID for a very long time. And the exceptions prove the rule.

I also strenuously objected to closing the local polling sites in my county and state. (We activists were only able to delay it 2 years. Mostly by exposing lies of vendors and their lackeys.)

One of the (many) reasons was the long term decline of USPS, mostly caused by the decades long revanchist campaign to dismantle it, to further undermine our democracy.

Those countries have robust and long establish national ID systems, and they do go a good job of making sure citizens easily obtain their ID.

The US has no such system.

There are millions of adult citizens without valid government issues photo ID acceptable and who cannot reasonably afford to get it. Before you say that states offer free ID, it is not the cost of the ID itself that is the issue. It is the cost of getting supporting documents.

Often getting copies of the supporting documents requires showing ID. Oops. There are alternate procedures, which often involve hard to find documents, often not digitized or centralized.

The only way to do a voter ID system in the US without disenfranchising a large number of voters is to establish a system similar to other countries with a national ID that is easy for every citizen to obtain and we grandfather in existing citizens by making the new system only required for people who are born after it is instituted.

1) Driver's license, even expired if expired within the last 2 years

2) State Non-Driver's ID

3) Out of state Driver's License

4) Passport

5) Free Voter ID

6) College / University ID

7) School employee ID

Additionally all the following are valid, without any limitations on expiration as long as they are photo IDs:

1) Military / veterans ID

2) Tribal enrollment ID for Native tribes

3) Any other photo ID issued by any federal or the state's government agencies

In addition to all of that, if you still are unable to produce an ID, you can still vote with a "provisional ballot" and sign an affidavit declaring your inability to obtain an ID. All of the following are valid reasons:

1) Lack of transportation

2) Disability or illness

3) Lack of supporting documentation to obtain an ID (birth certificates etc)

4) Work or school schedule

5) Family responsibilities

6) A lost, stolen or misplaced ID

7) Applied for an ID but haven't received it

8) Other impediment (write in)

9) Religious objection to being photographed

10) Victim of a declared natural disaster within 100 days of the election

All provisional ballots must be counted before the state can certify the vote count and a provisional ballot can only be rejected by unanimous vote of the board of elections commission that the ID exception form was filled out falsely.

That seems a pretty reasonable system to me given how it's pretty much impossible to interact with the state, the federal government, banks or employers without a photo ID these days.

To use Sweden as an example, there is no need for supporting documents. When a person here want a passport or national ID, and they don't already have a valid id, all they need is someone else with an valid ID to sign the paper. It can be a coworker, a teacher, a relative, or basically anyone with some form of relation to the person. The same apply for voting, so someone can go and vote as long they have a second person with an ID willing to sign that they are who they claim to be. Not a single paper required and all they need to do is say their name and date of birth.

No birth recipient, no electrical bill, no tax receipt, no money, nor any other paper which is honestly a less secure system that simply having already identified person signing a legally binding paper.

I’m working as a poll worker for the current US election, and I can’t see how you would do it. We don’t check ID.