Louis DeJoy, Trump’s personal flunky currently occupying the once august office of Postmaster General of the United States, has been subject of widespread reporting that he has enthusiastically sabotaged the U.S. Postal Service with the intention of suppressing the vote in the now ongoing Presidential Election. Those reports have largely been concerned with sabotage of Postal operations by dismantling sorting machines in the mail processing plants and playing musical chairs with mail collection boxes. Presumably, Trump and his minions hope that mail delays could result in the rejection of enough votes to change election results in some locations. Yesterday, however, I received an unexpected wake up call suggesting that Trump’s despicable political meddling with the mail could run even more deeply and dangerously than has yet been discovered.
Those who follow this blog already know that I have broader and deeper knowledge of the U.S. Postal Service than most Americans. 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. 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 mail delivery and other service standards in difficult and changing times. From Postmasters, Plant Managers, District and Area Executives, down the line through the managers and supervisors of the local post offices, along with numberless clerks, carriers, mail handlers and specialists, I became acquainted with most details of how American gets processed, moved and delivered.
Which brings us to what happened yesterday.
When we brought in the mail, the neighbor’s voter IDs from the Election Board were in with our mail. Probably everyone who reads this has received an occasional misdelivered mail piece. No big deal, right? Don’t give it a second thought. Except, because of all of the news about USPS sabotage by Trump forces, and the fact that this was a misdelivery of election mail, I did give it a second thought, which was, how the hell did that happen?
The people who live in my neighborhood live here because they value diversity. If you walked once around our block, and spoke to the people in each of the homes, you would encounter the descendants of people from every inhabited continent of the World. So, while Ms. Left and I are pasty blue Northwestern Europeans in ancestry, the our next door neighbors, whose election mail we received, are African-Americans.
It would likely never occur to someone, unaware of how the Postal Service actually operates, to even speculate that the racial identity of an addressee could possibly have anything to do with the reason for a misdelivery of mail. But, while one observation may be a happenstance, and two is a coincidence, three may be justification for further inquiry and, perhaps, hypothesis.
For me, in this case, a single misdelivery was a happenstance. The race of the addressees was a mere coincidence. But, from public reports, I have knowledge of the heavy handed, top-down political corruption that has engulfed the U.S. Postal Service as a result of Donald John Trump’s reelection campaign. That knowledge has a background of my erstwhile intimate and detailed knowledge of Postal operations obtained during many years of privileged access as a USPS Attorney. Consequently, I know that, theoretically, by reprogramming the address management systems that control mail sorting machines, mail intended for one addressee could easily be diverted from one address to another on a particular delivery route. Thus, began to speculate about the cyber possibilities for corrupting election mail deliveries if malevolent forces obtained control of certain aspects of data operations at the Postal Service.
The Postal Service’s extraordinary and proprietary technology for high speed sorting of vast mail volumes has been well reported, in general terms, at least, as in this informative article from Scientific American —
When the letter arrives at the local distribution-and-processing center, it gets put into machines that sort mail now—not by city or by zip code but by actual carrier route within the city. In many cases, it’s prearranged in what’s known as walk order, the order in which the carrier is going to walk the route. And that automates a whole other process: carriers used to have to get to the post office, I’d say at five or six o’clock in the morning, and do all of that sorting of the mail for their route before they went to deliver mail. Now [when they] arrive in the morning, the mail is already delivered from the distribution center to the local post office, sorted in that walk order.
For everyone who got this far, even though thinking that the simplest explanation, for the misdelivery, would be a mistake by the carrier, that might not be true.
During early years of my USPS career, the company (yeah, we called it the company, on the white collar floors) was transitioning from carrier sorted route mail, an age old manual practice of carrier’s sorting their route’s mail into delivery packets by address, in order of walk, to what Scientific America describes above, abbreviated by the company as DPS (Delivery Point Sequence) mail.
There was a lot of resistance to the change by carriers and their union, because reducing office time for letter carriers, spent hand sorting mail, expanded their street time and allowed fewer carriers and fewer routes, to deliver a given service area. Every challenge and argument imaginable was waged against the effectiveness and efficiency of DPS, for years, but eventually subsided as all levels of the organization adapted to and accepted the accuracy of the system. DPS mail has enormously reduced the likelihood of carrier error causing a misdelivery.
Still, perhaps Occam’s Razor would insist that the misdelivery was, indeed, a mistake by our letter carrier, failing to properly split DPS mail between one address and the adjacent one. But even assuming that to be the simplest explanation, I can’t help but fervently desire, once all of this Trump bullshit is over, the new government digs deeply into all of the guts and viscera of Federal institutions, down to the last lonely diverticulum, to find all of the rot.
And yes, I am prone to think the worst of the Trump assholes.
/rant