RE: Mail-in voting
This is like arguing with someone about aliens.
Good luck in the smack forum, At Ease
Lad, you've missed some of the conversation. I won't waste your time other than to say that any references to rural places (which skew right) or 'postal union workers' (who skew left, and are on the opposite side of the discussion from 'management') 1) come from his own sources and 2) are designed only to show that these situations he himself has presented are directly and indirectly at odds with the claims he thinks they prove. That's all.
There doesn't seem to be a consensus on exactly how many machines have actually been removed or from specifically where. We only know for a fact (based on anything presented here by anyone) about one machine being scrapped for parts. We are told (by someone with reason not to support management here) that 'some' of the machines have been repurposed within USPS which means they're at least doing some of what you asked in terms of at least 'some' of them still being in use or useful. Is some 1 or 499? We don't know.
As to 'is now the right time time'; well, I guess that depends on perspectives and lots of information that we don't know.
From appearances, no... so it's been stopped.
Here's the thing though... This has been described as something that 'the new guy' has put into action... I'm looking for confirmation of that. He started 6/15 and 'documents in june' show that (from memory, but I'm close) 525 machines are to be removed by 9/30... but 'previous plans' had 475 of them being removed by 7/30. "Previous' isn't defined. He may not have had anything to do with that, other than not being priescent enough to stop it. Given that from 7/30-9/30, they are removing 50 machines over 60 days, it seems unlikely that they would announce sometime between 6/15 and 6/30 that 475 would have to be removed within 30-45 days. I'm not claiming I'm right, I'm merely applying logic rather than speculation when facts are not present. I don't know that we can claim FACTUALLY that 'he' started this, or even that it wasn't planned prior to any meaningful expectation of a pandemic impacting the election.
Even knowing 'San Antonio' isn't enough to know if it is politically motivated. Unless every zip code in SA is identical... it COULD be targeting Reps, or it COULD be targeting Dems or it could be totally random. Why would you risk your freedom, career and reputation to influence an election if you didn't choose the direction? If San Antonio has (just making up numbers) average daily volume of 2mm pieces of 1st class mail and they have capacity for 4mm pieces so they want to remove a machine which reduces their capacity to 3mm, they can still easily process up to 1mm ballots PER DAY for a city of 1.5mm people. 600k voted in 2016 in the whole county.
In the past 5 years, 1st class mail is down 10byn pieces... 15-20%
retail visits are down by 140mm or about the same 15-20%
retail locations are down by only 1,000 or about 3%
I didn't quote it but you can look, I don't think total employment is down anywhere near 15%... but I could be wrong.
In the 5 years prior to that, you see very similar numbers.
There is STRONG evidence that there have been lots of places to cut and still have plenty of/excess capacity. We don't know how much of that actually happened. In terms of retail locations, not much. Maybe lots has already been done and this IS all political, or maybe not much of it has been done and its not a problem at all.
My point there is that you (anyone) can choose to believe what you choose to believe... but that's a choice and not proof. If you want to prove to me that this is happening, then the burden is on you to prove it. The burden is not on me to prove that its not.
As I said, if this is truly a concern of yours... I suggest you write your state elections board and 'work around' the USPS.... which certainly has been used by the government, but they are under no obligation to limit themselves to them.
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