A brief political digression

Obligatory trigger warning: US politics

Hi, Internet. The pandemic is still raging, a civil war is still brewing;
things are still about as bad as they have been.

But I'm not writing about life in the pandemic era, today. Not specifically.

I want to discuss the narrative about the US Postal Service, which has been
much in the news here in the last few days, because it seems there's a lot of
speculation being offered (and accepted) without much in the way of evidence.

The Orange Menace appointed a new (and reportedly legally ineligible, haha)
Postmaster General, who immediately started making sweeping changes at the post
office.

Well... that's what everyone says. What we *actually know* is that some postal
collection boxes were to be removed, and that a large number of mail-sorting
machines were to be removed. Additionally, it's alleged that there's a
concerted effort afoot to slow the movement of mail and delay its delivery. (In
the sense that a letter or package that might in years past have gone from A to
B in 3 days now takes 5, say.)

The USPS explanation is that *letter* mail is dramatically down in volume
because of the pandemic, and that all these machines which sort letters and
other "flat" mail aren't presently needed. This is also offered as explanation
for the removal (and now locking in lieu of removal) of collection boxes.

The widely expressed assumption is that this is part of a scheme to interfere
with the November election, to give The Orange Menace some sort of illegal
advantage. And it's this part of the story that I have problems with.

I believe it to be true that letter mail is down. (And that package mail is up,
because ecommerce.) And I can definitely believe that use of collection boxes
is way, way down across most of the country. (If you don't know, you can only
put packages weighing, I believe, under 14 ounces, in a collection box;
anything heavier has to be taken to the post office / handed to a letter
carrier. So collection boxes are for the most part not applicable to ecommerce
returns.)

But it makes no sense to *remove* mail-sorting machines en masse, because -
surely - letter mail will increase again... right? The holidays are coming up,
and bringing with them, you know, catalogs, and flyers, and... holiday cards.
All of which go through those high-volume mail-sorting machines. So that's kind
of weird.

But what makes even less sense is how slowing the mail is supposed to actually
give The Orange Menace an advantage in the election. And it's this part that
nobody seems able to explain.

Is... it supposed to slow the delivery of absentee ballots to voters? In most
states, as far as I know, ballots get sent out weeks in advance. And they don't
go cross-country; they're mailed from, in, each voter's local state. I don't
see how adding a day, two days, even three extra days to their delivery helps
aid election shenanigans.

Is it supposed to slow the delivery of *filled-out* ballots? Avoiding the fact
that people can (and do) mail in their ballots well before election day (are
there *really* any undecided voters this year, waiting until the last minute to
make up their mind?), they, again, aren't going far, at all; they're delivered
at the county level. As far as I can tell most filled-out absentee ballots
aren't ever going to pass through a main sorting hub.

I just don't see how you get from the facts to "trying to steal the election".
Maybe there's something I'm missing, something we don't know.

The metaphorical fly in the ointment might be the allegation that mail movement
is deliberately being slowed, though. I don't know if it's actually true; there
doesn't seem to be any direct evidence of this that I can find. (An argument
could perhaps be made--and note I have not seen anyone make this, yet--that the
inexplicable removal of sorting machines is removing *too many* machines,
deliberately leaving too few to handle the current volume of letter mail.)

If this is true, it's a fantastically stupid idea. (Which in these troubled
times does not, alas, prevent it from being true.) Anyone who's read the late
Terry Pratchett's novel "Going Postal" will be familiar with the problem; if
you're unable to deliver the day's mail every single day, the postal service
will quickly collapse under the ever-increasing backlog.

It'd be a ruthlessly savage and effective way of destroying the postal service.
And it'd do far, far more damage to the country--both in the short and long
term--than potentially interfering with the upcoming election. (It's far from
certain that interfering indiscriminately with mail-in voting would actually
benefit either candidate.)

What's really going on? I'll be damned if I know. Here's hoping we all at least
live long enough to find out...