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Seriously! How many times does the United States Postal Service with its admittedly poor budget accurately handle advertising mail *addressed specifically* to every household in a community? Twice a week? (It used to be more.) Has the USPS told people not to send holiday cards any more because they can't handle the load? (There used to be more.) Trump is trying to scare voters in states just starting mail-in voting from doing it this year. He specifically told the governor of Arizona recently that our state was doing mail-in right. What does that mean? It means when most of us in Arizona were mailing in our ballots four years ago, just like always, he won the state (no thanks to my vote).
I don't know of any state, ever, that didn't have a procedure for having a signature with absentee ballots to check the person voting is the one who registered to vote. We need to be far more worried about corrupt election officials than illegal voting. People trying to vote twice by mail can and do get caught, even caught voting in two different states, not twice in the same place.
Sorting the mail to send out the ballots takes some time, even though the addresses on the ballots are machine printed and at the post office they are machine read. Ballots have to be sent out well in advance. I don't think there are many people who don't understand this. When the ballots are returned there only has to be a very quick sorting to make sure all the ballots are headed to the right zip code. All the ballot return-envelopes in this state look the same, are not white, and are a different size from everything else. No trick to separating them from the rest of the mail. You just have to make sure the zip code matches. You can do that by hand faster than you can stuff them in a machine. Somebody's ballot mailed from a different city will have to be pulled out and sent through the machinery to the right place. Otherwise they all get dumped in the same bags and sent to the local election commission, once a day. Compared to holiday cards with handwritten addresses, it's easy-peasy. As long as the states new to mass mail-in voting aren't insisting on using the standard business-letter-size white envelope for ballot returns it won't be much worse.
Will there be problems? Certainly. With anything new, with anything involving human beings, mistakes will pop up. Voters should be aware you can't always guarantee that a first class letter will get across a big city in a couple days anymore. Some voters will send their ballots too late, and their vote won't count. Will all the counting be done election night? Probably not. Will enough of the counting be done election night to know who won. In most cases probably so.
Trump is lying, as usual, to scare people from voting by mail and from voting in general. And yes, Mr. and Mrs. D. Trump are voting by mail this year. Give the Post Office more money, but stop lying about what it's capable of doing without Herculean effort.
And news media? Know enough to call Trump when he's bluffing.
I don't know of any state, ever, that didn't have a procedure for having a signature with absentee ballots to check the person voting is the one who registered to vote. We need to be far more worried about corrupt election officials than illegal voting. People trying to vote twice by mail can and do get caught, even caught voting in two different states, not twice in the same place.
Sorting the mail to send out the ballots takes some time, even though the addresses on the ballots are machine printed and at the post office they are machine read. Ballots have to be sent out well in advance. I don't think there are many people who don't understand this. When the ballots are returned there only has to be a very quick sorting to make sure all the ballots are headed to the right zip code. All the ballot return-envelopes in this state look the same, are not white, and are a different size from everything else. No trick to separating them from the rest of the mail. You just have to make sure the zip code matches. You can do that by hand faster than you can stuff them in a machine. Somebody's ballot mailed from a different city will have to be pulled out and sent through the machinery to the right place. Otherwise they all get dumped in the same bags and sent to the local election commission, once a day. Compared to holiday cards with handwritten addresses, it's easy-peasy. As long as the states new to mass mail-in voting aren't insisting on using the standard business-letter-size white envelope for ballot returns it won't be much worse.
Will there be problems? Certainly. With anything new, with anything involving human beings, mistakes will pop up. Voters should be aware you can't always guarantee that a first class letter will get across a big city in a couple days anymore. Some voters will send their ballots too late, and their vote won't count. Will all the counting be done election night? Probably not. Will enough of the counting be done election night to know who won. In most cases probably so.
Trump is lying, as usual, to scare people from voting by mail and from voting in general. And yes, Mr. and Mrs. D. Trump are voting by mail this year. Give the Post Office more money, but stop lying about what it's capable of doing without Herculean effort.
And news media? Know enough to call Trump when he's bluffing.