Until last week, I hadn’t voted by mail. since 1972. So, when I mailed my ballot at the post office on 10/16, I promised myself that I wouldn’t start to panic, if the ballot tracker didn’t confirm delivery, until Tuesday, at the earliest, giving the USPS three full business days to collect, process, dispatch and deliver my ballot to the Election Board in downtown St. Louis, less than four miles away (a 1 hour 17 minute walk, according to Google Maps).
From 2003 until I retired in 2015, I was an attorney employed to do field legal work by the General Counsel of the U.S. Postal Service. Although my home office was in Chicago, for many of those years, a great deal of that legal work was on behalf of the St. Louis, MO Post Office. Through that work, I became very well acquainted with the culture of that organization and many of the truly fine people who worked so hard to maintain service standards in difficult and changing times. From the Postmaster, Plant Managers, and Gateway District Executives, through the managers and supervisors of the local post offices, along with numberless clerks, carriers, mail handlers and specialists, I came to know one of the finest and most effective units of the U.S. Postal Service encountered in my years of work in nine different States.
So, as I reluctantly contemplated voting by mail, I couldn’t help but wonder if, or how much Dejoy’s widely reported sabotage of the USPS had damaged what is now my local post office. Then, today, as I confirm, for the second consecutive day, that my ballot hasn’t been delivered, the Front Page informs me that, surprise, surprise, the sabotage was targeted at places where it was most likely to interfere with votes for Biden and other Democrats.
Well, in St. Louis our middle name is votes for Biden and other Democrats. We are also a very diverse city. If you are white, like me, and don’t like encountering black people at every juncture of your daily life, move to the county. With a smattering of others categories, our city population is about half black and half white. Every officeholder elected here is a Democrat. Perhaps 20% — 25% of the electorate is Republican, largely now limited to some mansion dwellers in the LIndell-Dabaliviere neighborhood and some rednecks and white supremacists in a few Southside neighborhoods. If Dejoy was out to sabotage Democratic votes wherever he found them, the St. Louis Post Office could be high on some lists.
And now, my mailed ballot is running well behind the USPS processing and delivery standards with which I was once very familiar.
Once upon a time, the gold standard for mail moving within the St. Louis Post Office ran something like this: At a neighborhood post office substation of the Main Post Office, a customer drops mail in a collection box. At the end of the work day, all of the collection mail for that location would be bagged and dispatched to the Processing and Distribution Center downtown, next door to the Main Post Office on Market Street. These P and DCs are among the quietest places in USPS during daylight, and the noisiest and busiest at night. Upon arrival of the trucks in the evening, mail handlers unload the mail and turn it over to postal clerks for primary sortation. If not already printed with it, each piece of mail is printed with a unique barcode and the 24 hour clock starts running. By morning the mail has run through a series of machines that placed it into route sorted trays for delivery. It is then loaded into trucks that take it to the local postal stations in the city for carriers to deliver. By the next morning. That’s right folks. The standard was one day delivery in town.
My ballot could have arrived at the Election Board on Saturday . . . Monday at the latest. But it didn’t. Nor did it arrive today. Election mail has, objectively, been delayed. For how long, we do not yet know. When I informed her of this, my companion of over 50 years remarked that it didn’t seem long to her. But with only two weeks before the ballot must be received, one day too many, to deliver the ballot, is too many days.
There is only one small, yet big lesson to be learned from this account. Mail your ballot immediately. You can’t possibly come up with a credible excuse to do otherwise. MAIL YOUR BALLOT NOW! (sorry, didn’t mean to holler).
