President Trump’s recent attacks on the United States Postal Service led me to wonder: what is the relationship between Vladimir Putin and Russian Post, the national postal operator of Russia? It being Russia and all, it can’t be that good; but how bad can it be? After all, Trump solicited Putin’s help during the 2016 campaign and Trump is getting help and most likely advice from Putin this time around too. So, if the Russians are giving Trump and his fellow Republicans advice about the USPS, what advice might that be?
Now you might think “The USPS has nothing to do with Russia,” but hear me out. Let’s start with some context.
A Russian Post office / bank in Saratov.
Russian Post is an even bigger deal in Russia than the USPS is here: it employs roughly one in every 370 Russians, whereas the USPS employs about one in every 520 Americans. Part of this is because Russia is more spread-out than the US. Part is because Russian Post does more stuff, including commercial banking and selling beer to fight alcoholism. And part is because Russian Post is inefficient and part of that inefficiency is because it has an unstated job: to help keep Russia’s current ruler in power.
The inefficiency of Russian Post is legendary. Its users joke that its slogan is “All is not lost”. It takes weeks or even months to deliver parcels. Its employees are paid poorly, and many are elderly pensioners who can struggle with new technology. Vladímir Erkovich’s “Russian Post Office: Why so slow?” quotes one Russian postal customer describing what happened after she went to check on a package that hadn’t arrived for weeks:
Having braved the huge line of customers, I found out that my parcel had been there all along: the branch simply didn't have the staff to take it to my apartment. Moreover, there was only one employee, who just didn't have time to keep the computer records on incoming parcels up to date,
This is a glimpse of how the USPS might operate in the future if Trump and his fellow Republicans get their way, no?
The results of last month’s constitutional referendum in Russia. According to government tallies, Putin’s side got 79% of the votes and won every federal subject except Nenets (population 44,000).
It’s not just bad service, though. Putin also uses Russian Post to maintain his political power. “Russian state servers are hosting a third-party system that monitors voter turnout”, published in June by Meduza (a Latvian-based news site staffed by Russian journalists who can’t do their job safely in Russia), describes how information technology specialists working for Russian Post have been “mobilized” to create software apps and a website that monitors voter turnout among employees of Russian Post and other large state-sponsored companies. During Russia’s recent constitutional referendum, basically over whether Putin could become president-for-life (which was approved of course), “volunteers” at polling stations scanned QR codes of voters under the pretense of staging trivia contests or conducting quizzes, and thereby collected data on voter turnout, data that Putin could then use — after all, tracking voter turnout is essential to any modern election campaign.
These Russian voter-monitoring servers use Russian Post infrastructure, and collect personal data of voters. Meduza interviewed Stanislav Andreychuk, co-chair of a voters’ rights organization, and wrote:
Andreychuk emphasizes that people who are forced into going to the polls cannot cast their ballots freely — those who show up to vote due to coercion will naturally assume that if some third party is monitoring voter turnout, it can also find out how they voted.
Things are not this bad in the US, we assume. The US Postal Service is not visibly monitoring voter turnout on behalf of Trump and his fellow Republicans. Still … let’s suppose an unscrupulous Republican well-connected to the USPS wanted to monitor voters. What technology would be available? Here are a couple of ideas:
- The USPS has long photographed every letter and package in the United States; see Ron Nixon’s 2013 New York Times article “Postal Service Confirms Photographing All U.S. Mail”. You can get scans of the covers of all your incoming letters by subscribing to the USPS’s Informed Delivery service. The USPS keep scans for up to a month, and has sent them to duly authorized law enforcement agencies. And on July 30 in its Postal Bulletin 22551, the USPS touted Informed Delivery as a way for election officials to “increase voter interaction with their mail and generate faster response rates.”
- It might be expensive for unscrupulous Republicans to process all those scans to see who’s voting. But something else would be cheaper. Each mail-in ballot envelope has a Service Type Identifier (STID), a numeric code embedded within the envelope’s Intelligent Mail barcode which is used by mailers to gain more-detailed information about where their mail is going. As letters make their way through the postal system, they are scanned and their barcode data are sent electronically in near real-time to mailers, who can quickly find out when their mail to you is delivered or when you mail your response. And it just so happens that in August 2018 the USPS introduced twenty-odd STIDs for election-related mail, including three STIDs (777, 778, and 779) strictly for use in return ballots.
An example Intelligent Mail barcode. Its 65 bars represent 31 digits, three of which are the STID that tell you whether this letter is an election ballot.
That second option sounds pretty appealing, no? If unscrupulous Republicans tapped into the data generated by USPS’s scanning and sorting equipment, they’d know which ballots were being delivered on time and which were late, and which people had responded already, and they could use that to use their get-out-the-vote dollars more efficiently. They wouldn’t even need to know details about the barcodes used by all the voting jurisdictions in the US; all they’d need to do is look at the 3-digit STID and see whether it equals 777, 778, or 779.
And as long as we’re assuming Republicans have access to that data, there are other things they could do. They could track Democratic political mail by scanning for political mail STIDs like 728 (basic political marketing mail, no address corrections) and subtracting mail they already know about from the Republican side.
All this would be a significant advantage for Republicans in their voter turnout efforts. And if done right, hardly anybody in the USPS would know. The data stream is there; all they need to do is tap it.
Now, what can Democrats do about this? We’re not in charge of the USPS: Trump is, and his Postmaster General replaced USPS leadership on August 7 for reasons that remain murky. But what we can do is raise the alarm and make mail security a part of any budget negotiations. When Trump’s Postmaster General Louis DeJoy testifies before Congress, we can ask him:
- During the Trump administration, what changes have been made to the USPS processing system to handle ballots and other political mail? How exactly does this work?
- What security measures have been put into place to protect the scans that the USPS makes of every letter, and of the Intelligent Mail barcode data stream that recently started monitoring political mail specially?
- If an unscrupulous mailer or USPS political insider attempted to get hold of this data, what measures does the USPS have to prevent this? For example, suppose a dirty trickster bribed a USPS employee or impersonated a mailing agent from a different political party — what would happen?
- How does the USPS test its security measures, how often does it do these tests, and how well did it perform in its recent security tests?
American voters deserve to know the answers to these questions. And any bill to fund the USPS should require good answers to those questions.
