In Reply to: Rainy days and Mondays always have some news* posted by mh on August 31, 2026 at 08:56:44
In order to understand how preposterous the proposed USPS rule on mailing absentee ballots is, you need to look at the fine print - let's dive in to one small aspect - scanning.
Here is the rule itself. "Outbound Federal Ballot mailings must be entered at a Post Office retail counter, including manual post offices, or a BMEU (business mail entry unit)"
In other words, you have to physically take the ballots to the post office, you cannot just mail them in a post box. Per USPS: "These mailings may not be entered into blue collection boxes, collection boxes in retail lobbies, or through other means."
Once they are at the post office, each ballot must be verified - that is having its barcode scanned. No biggie, right? But wait - how long does it take to scan a ballot? 4/
According to USPS, "Scanning a barcode generally takes less than a minute per mailpiece."
No problem - you can drop off the ballots and go back to the office while they scan, right? Nope!
"Authorized Ballot Mailers should remain at the BMEU or postal retail location during the verification process."
Let's think about the amount of time that entails - the City of Milwaukee mailed out 33,567 ballots for the primary election.
At a minute each, that's 559.45 hours or 69.94 work days / at 30 seconds each, that's 279.73 hours or 34.97 work days. A month of days of someone standing at a post office, watching a scanner. Heck, at 10 seconds each, it's 93.25 hrs or 2 more than work weeks.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but ballots go out 9/17/26 in Wisconsin - we don't have 35 work days. This is true across the nation. And I haven't even gotten into the fact that the portal that the data is supposed to be entered into *doesn't exist*!!
This isn't about ballot integrity. This isn't about non-citizens voting (which is vanishingly rare). This is about stopping absentee voting in its tracks. And the judge who enjoined it yesterday was right on the money.