Yet another Hacker News

Ballot Rejections Have Soared in Rural Counties as USPS Reduces Mail Service

37 points ck2 2 hours ago 14 comments

ck2 2 hours ago | parent

this is an anchor link to their zip-code check near middle of page:

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

hedora 1 hour ago | parent

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

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.

elmer2 34 minutes ago | parent

"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.

zarify 30 minutes ago | parent

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

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).

amanaplanacanal 10 minutes ago | parent

Is also like to point out that in other countries the national government issues ID to their citizens. The US doesn't have anything like that.

expedition32 26 minutes ago | parent

Voter ID was an issue in my country. By law everyone has to carry valid ID on them at all times.

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.

mrktf 3 minutes ago | parent

In my country that group of people is surprisingly active voters (where I live there a lot of discounts for disadvantaged people to get ID - hard part is queue in migration office) and coincidentally there good people which organizes buses to make easier travel for vote.../s On more serious note is very open secret especially in small counties .

mikestew 16 minutes ago | parent

Ah, the "rampant voter fraud" narrative. Which has been disproven time and again, including when Republicans go looking for it (see: Arizona).

kotaKat 1 hour ago | parent

Yep. Welcome to "regional transportation optimization". Every single day is painful being in an RTO territory for the post office.

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.

hyperhello 1 hour ago | parent

Of course a few rural votes will be rejected, but rest assured plenty more of the urban votes will be rejected too, for a net gain of many rural votes!

exabrial 1 hour ago | parent

There'd be enough to do that if the USPS wasn't busy burning thousands of tons of Diesel fuel to haul Verizon and Citi card advertisements to everyone else.

gamblor956 38 minutes ago | parent

10 years ago, mail service used to be great. Than Trump brought in the idiot from FedEx who "upgraded" the mail service. Even though the volume of mail has dropped 50%, the USPS now struggles to properly process the remaining mail on a timely basis.

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.

elmer2 32 minutes ago | parent

This has nothing to do with the Fedex guy. It's because they aren't allowed to increase the cost of postage due to a federal mandate from decades ago.

"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.

gamblor956 4 minutes ago | parent

It's because they aren't allowed to increase the cost of postage due to a federal mandate from decades ago.

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. The Dem employee behind the Alaska stunt was working for him at the time.

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.