I just received this from my local election board:
Dear Voter:
The Universal Postal Union (UPU) is a worldwide body that establishes and agrees on international postal rates. The U.S. has announced it may pull out of UPU. If we do, there will be no agreement for mail to be delivered to or from our country to any other country after October 16, 2019. The federal government will have to negotiate with 191 countries on postal rates. Although the U.S. Postal Service and others have been working on contingency plans, those plans are unlikely to be in place in time for military and overseas citizen (UOCAVA) voters to return their ballots in time for the November 2019 elections. Your best option may be to
make sure your ballot is in the mail in plenty of time to make it to the U.S. before October 16, 2019.
This is from FREIGHTWAVES:
Barring an eleventh-hour agreement, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) will leave the Universal Postal Union (UPU) on October 17, ending 144 years of U.S. involvement in the international body that governs the exchange of mail and postal parcels between countries, and perhaps fundamentally changing the landscape of global air shipping.
Members of the 192-member United Nations body will gather on September 25 and 26 in Geneva, Switzerland in only the third “extraordinary Congress” in UPU history. The key agenda item will be to vote on what UPU is calling the “possible revision of small packet remuneration rates,” which is the core issue to determine the future of U.S. involvement.
The U.S. State Department, which is the lead negotiator for the U.S. in UPU, has submitted a proposal that would allow the U.S. to “self-declare” international postage pricing and to decide on subsidy levels, if any. Unless the UPU agrees to the proposal by a September 30 deadline, the U.S. will leave the Union 17 days later and, over time, begin a framework of bilateral negotiations with individual postal authorities. The self-declare regime would begin in 2020.
The practical effect of the exit of the U.S. would be a rate increase of at least 300 percent on postal parcel traffic to the U.S. from heavy net exporting countries as rates kept artificially low for decades begin to normalize, according to Matthew White, a strategist for iDrive Logistics, a consultancy working with customers to prepare contingency plans for the possible U.S. exit. U.S.-based international shippers will also pay more, at least over the short-term, because USPS will cancel negotiated service agreements (NSA) covering international shipments if the withdrawal takes place, White said.
President Trump telegraphed the departure in an August 2018 memorandum, saying that certain “current international postal practices in the UPU do not align with United States economic and national security interests.” President Trump’s memorandum raised concerns with two practices. One is the inability of foreign postal services to furnish advance electronic shipment data, which U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) needs to improve its ability to flag and detect high-risk shipments, as well as facilitate import flows.
The other, and more politically charged, issue is with the UPU’s 50-year-old “terminal dues” structure, which are the funds paid to the postal authority of the destination country by the authority of the origin country. The 1969 UPU Congress adopted the current terminal dues system, which governs cross-border delivery of packages and letters weighing less than 4.85 pounds. Instead of basing terminal dues on the actual handling costs incurred by the destination country’s operator, the UPU established a “country classification” system factoring in different stages of member states’ economic development and the many variations in their mail volumes, tariffs and cost levels. As a result, developing countries enjoyed relatively low shipping rates into the U.S. Meanwhile, the U.S., with its highly advanced market, would typically pay more. Full article