Archive links: https://web.archive.org/web/20251229233408/https://bsky.app/profile/goldengateblond.bsky.social/post/3mb5t23bf3k23 or https://archive.is/uvuWB
If you want to vote by mail please do so as soon as you can and consider dropping it off at the counter where they will postmark it right away.
Also if you live in a state where you’re allowed to photograph your ballot consider doing so to have proof you voted a certain way.
Note that as a counterpoint the federal register website claims they are just clarifying language to improve public understanding: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/08/12/2025-15266/postmarks-and-postal-possession
I didn’t check that document very closely yet.
If you want to vote by mail please do so as soon as you can and consider dropping it off at the counter where they will postmark it right away.
Even then you have to request it. The term you need to ask for is “hand canceling”. The USPS worker will take a handheld ink stamp and mark over the postage stamp with the received date. That letter is now “processed” as received by the post office.
They’ve cheated before, they’ll do it again. It’s like playing whack-a-mole trying to get around it.
This is also going to wreak havoc with documents sent for any purpose that may be litigated, or legal in nature.
Yeah, but they never really care about consequences besides the one they’re aiming for.
The most short-sighted administration in American history.
i suspect the gop/TRUMP wants to use the courts to determine which and what gets thrown out, its going to be chaos.
If you don’t know when it is going to be stamped, then you cannot possibly plan accordingly. Trying to be early to get around the unreliable time frame isn’t planning accordingly, it is just guessing.
Especially when they’re sure to find ways to demolish post office processing times around election seasons specifically to kill mailed in ballots.
This isn’t relevant, even when we’ve been slammed local offices separate the ballots and bring them to a hub or county seat if it’s within a week of an election. Postal workers actually care about doing their jobs.
It isn’t relevant, yet, but we’re seeing changes in how these things are made to work that are decidedly deleterious to the reliability of mail in voting, and you’re deluded if you think they’re going to stop now. Even questions of legality are at best peripheral to this administration, more interference WILL be coming, and it won’t be something that Postal workers simply caring about their jobs will be able to resolve.
Postal workers actually care about doing their jobs.
Next step will be to get rid of those people by any means possible…
There’s a sort of inertia within the organization, you both can’t get rid of those people nor make them care more than they currently do. I think management has been trying to kill them off for decades. :)
people should be filing thier taxes electronically , in this case.
oh don’t get me started. they just took away freefile.
Majorly affects anyone who mails their tax forms
Right now, first class mail to homes in the Chicago area is taking two WEEKS to arrive due to holiday increases. I don’t think it’d be this bad at tax or voting deadlines, but it’s good to know what kind of variability you can expect, especially with all of the changes made to the US postal service since 2017.
Weeks? Fucking how? I work at a post office and today our OIC was running around with her hair on fire because the mail was three days late on one route.
It’s Illinois, so there are a lot of politics in play that aren’t usually an issue in most of the US. If someone in charge of my post office snubbed the wrong person at a work event, it wouldn’t be surprising if the snub-ee did things like moving money around to stop an order of new mail trucks from being deployed to our routes. (That’s not a democrat or republican thing, it’s an Illinois political machine thing.)
However, bigger political issues come into play, too. When DeJoy first took over, people in parts of my House district weren’t getting mail at all. He was removing mail sorting machines from post offices, for cryin’ out loud. Apartment buildings had package dumps that the residents had to comb through to hopefully find their stuff, if it hadn’t been stolen. Letters and packages were getting delayed or lost and being reported as delivered. (I’ve had at least one package get reported as delivered that showed up in my mailbox a week later, but a two-day delay between report and delivery is much more common.) People getting government checks and medication in the mail were left waiting for things that might or might not show up, no indicators of where they were, and nobody to ask for a status update. Just “item delivered at mailbox/front door” and nothing.
Ten years ago, it was $0.49 to mail a first class letter that would be delivered, pretty reliably, in about three days. Now that services have been “brought more into line with existing services” like FedEx and UPS, it’s $0.78 and shows up whenever.
got any resources you’d recommend, for someone trying to “catch up” on Illinois politics in particular?
xanax
I don’t have any suggestions, I’m sorry. It’s something you hear about from other people who have lived here longer and just kind of observe happening to you and around you through daily life, the news, and Wikipedia rabbit holes. My favorite depiction of the Machine is in the show South Side. I have no idea how true to life it is, but they capture the spirit of Chicago politics really well.
Lol back in 2019-2020, I volunteered with Marie Newman’s campaign. She was a progressive Democrat running for the House of Representatives, Illinois District 3, as a challenger to the incumbent Dan Lipinski (also a Democrat, but a socially conservative blue dog Dem, so he voted against things like abortion and health care). Here’s the thing about Dan Lipinski: he basically inherited the position from his father and kept it for seven terms. How does that work? Rep. Bill Lipinski ran for re-election in the Dem primary, won it, and then retired. He talked the IL Democratic Party into replacing him with his son on the election ballot. Here in northern Illinois (I don’t know how far the political machine reaches out from Chicago), the dem races are the only races because nobody up here votes republican. (Sidenote: Chuy Garcia, a progressive Representative from IL-4, got reprimanded last month for doing something similar: on the day of the deadline to register for the ballot, he waited until there were only a few hours left and announced his retirement. His chief of staff stepped forward as the only Dem eligible to register because she had already collected all the signatures she needed.)
With that background in mind, let’s get back to my anecdote! I was volunteering for this upstart campaign and I come into the office to all this chatter one day. It was a week or so until the primary, and even busier than expected, so I asked another volunteer what was up. They were trying to catch up on stuff they’d had planned for the previous day, when they’d been unable to work because someone from Lipinski’s campaign physically cut power to the office. If I remember correctly, the power cut was only to the section of the building where Newman’s campaign office and a couple others were, the kind of disruption that took some research to pull off. A breaker getting flipped could’ve been fixed in minutes, maybe an hour if it took that long for someone to go and check it. The power line was cut and getting a line worker to do the repair took them the whole day. Despite the Democratic machine’s best efforts, Newman won the seat. She held it right up until 2023, when they gerrymandered it out from under her.
You do not defy the Machine.
2 weeks is pretty insane for 1st class.
This will make it easier for nefarious parties to just hold onto mail as long as possible before stamping it.
Really, please just vote in person this time if you can.
Unless you’ll be intimidated by National Guard or ICE, in which case just vote as soon as possible.
Really just vote as soon as possible anyway. We all know there’s going to be illegal interference in the election. The question is to what extent and what kind. Do what you can to predict and avoid problems.
Some of the voter suppression involved having a single voting place for a large area, and closing it at 5pm even though there was a very long line of people still waiting to vote.
If you can’t guarantee your postal vote will be counted, and you can’t guarantee that you’ll get into a voting booth, what do you do?
I agree with the sentiment of voting however you can. It’s one of the few ways that people get to decide how the country is run. I’m just angry that this right is being gradually taken away.
You can often early vote in person at your county clerk’s office!
If you’re in line you’re guaranteed a vote
Theoretically.
That’s just law, and law means less than it used to these days. Understand your rights, fight for your rights, but don’t count on them in 2026.
time was you could more reliably count on the judicial than the executive. these last eight years however
Without water and bathrooms
Politely, people who don’t carry water bottles is like bruh
cali has official drop boxes, and polling places more safer to do that, weve have been doing that for a while. be aware there are attempts at using fake boxes during elections.
i’m not in a major city, but around here the official drop boxes are all usually in city hall up until the week prior
This isn’t technically new, mail doesn’t get a postmark stamp unless it’s collected over the retail counter by clerks, and usually only on regular stamped mail (non-metered). If you had your mail in your mailbox with the flag up and is picked up by your carrier, it goes directly on the truck to the regional sorting facility and is processed and stamped there. Unless your mail comes directly from a regional sorting facility, it is not stamped at your local office if not handed in over the counter.
However, with election ballots, we are instructed to have them separate from other outgoing mail, regardless of when it’s picked up to be kept in office and delivered to the town hall/voting location the following day. This is the case with all 3 offices I’ve worked at, in 2 different regional areas. Only exception is if they’re absentee ballots for other towns.
Definitely drop a ballot off directly if you’re cutting it close to election day to make absolutely sure it’s counted in time though, and obviously, VOTE.
Please vote irl if feasible .
yea we do that, finish the ballot drops in person. in blue states its much easier to do that, red ones will make sure its impossible or very difficult to do.
you can tell if they want you to vote if they have one line or two.
I had a whole comment that got eaten up in an error (and a Lemmy client that doesn’t fail gracefully, I really should be moving off of Sync). But maybe that’ll be an opportunity to give a more concise summary of what’s going on.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/08/12/2025-15266/postmarks-and-postal-possession
This USPS notice is basically correct. The meaning of postmarks isn’t changing: it’s a mark that definitely proves that mail was in the Postal Service’s possession on that date. The absence of a mark doesn’t mean the absence of possession, and the date of a mark does not foreclose the possibility that the mail was in the Postal Service’s possession on an earlier date.
It does note there are operational changes where they’re now taking fewer trips in certain low volume zip codes, and that expands the number of places where postmarks are being applied on the next USPS operational day: usually the next day, but a second day if the next day is Sunday or a holiday, or a third day when the next day is a Sunday and the day after that is a Monday holiday.
Someone mailing something may still request a same-day postmark from the postal facility they’re dropping it off at, but that’s not helpful if they’re already past business hours or using an unattended outgoing mail box.
Most importantly, though, it only has a small potential to affect voting.
- Most states require ballots to be received by election day, and postmark day doesn’t matter.
- Even in states that look to postmarks, they still have a deadline to be received by a particular grace period, so you’ll want to get the mail sent as early as possible anyway.
- The Supreme Court just heard a case, and will rule by June, on whether states are even allowed to follow the postmark date instead of the received by date.
- Election Day is on a Tuesday not near a holiday. So the operational changes will only add a single day to the postmark date, in the low population areas that don’t deal with a lot of mail, for people who don’t request a same day postmark from the post office.
Yeah, I saw this getting spread around and facepalmed, I’m a carrier and it’s basically not a change – just logistics changes that can have an impact +/- a day. When first class mail went off the next day standard a few years ago is when this really changed, and it was about business efficiency and prioritizing packages. I also facepalm when I see ballots in outgoing the day before an election, but we run those separate to the county seat or a closer hub office to get them delivered on time.
Any suggestions for a fellow Sync user who is also looking to move?
Transcription:
A post from bluesky stating “As of 12/24/25, USPS changed policy on when they postmark mail. Mail dropped off is no longer guaranteed a same-day postmark. Tax returns & other time-sensitive items are now stamped when they reach a regional processing center, which may be days later. Plan deadlines accordingly to avoid penalties.” Another user commented on the post “this seems specifically designed to break mail-in voting (where deadlines are defined by postmark)”.
this seems specifically designed to break mail-in voting
This is specifically for doing that. Processing centers will be understaffed in heavily Democratic areas, Republican strongholds will have mail that magically gets a stamp fifteen nanoseconds later. Republicans can literally not win without resorting to cheating.
They don’t even need to understaff them, that shit is all automated these days. Just manufacture a breakdown and voila.
remember dejoy destroyed most of the sorters in 2020, and then did next to nothing for the next 4 years. it was his sole purpose for being chosen, i dont think he was suppose to last that long.
I wonder what % of ballots are going to get thrown out.
All of them if by mail.
the ones in democratic counties, like they did in '24. they suspiciously stopped counting in most counties when trump was leading.
This is also making the mail less reliable. The mail is a vital piece of the functioning of the country but they want to privatize it
Here in Colorado we vote by mail, in person or, relevant to this development, we are allowed to drop a ballot into an actual ballot container. It’s like a mailbox but only unlocked during elections.
Great for suburbanites like me but in rural districts might be a bit of a hike.
Have the same thing out here in California.
i heard colorado, i is largely resistant to the change.
Our governor is pretty much an asshole but yeah, he’s standing up to Trump a little.
Thing is, he can’t do anything about the USPS
Interesting that this is even relevant in the US.
Here in Germany the only relevant metric is whether a document has arrived at the recipient before any given deadline, from ballots to legal documents. It is considered your responsibility to ensure sending anything sufficiently early.
Sure but you gotta remember, your system is run by Germans, we just have fucking Americans in charge of everything over here!
It’s possible that American trains are more on-time to than German trains these days…
“American” “trains”? I understand those words separately, but they don’t make sense together
Nah, order and organization is a German thing, not a Nazi thing.
The center right government in Germany spent the last decade or so underfunding public institutions, such as Deutsche Bahn, and now train travel in Germany sucks ass.
Ah, I thought you were making a The US is Run by Nazis joke. Which, y’know, it basically is these days.
Wow. That’s subject to abuse though unless there is a maintained predictable transit time. Maintaining a timestamp for the handoff is a critical tracking metric.
How would it be subject to abuse¹? Deliveries are somewhat predictable, by law 95% of letters must arrive within 3 days, 99% within 4 days. Mail-in ballots “should” be delivered within 2 days.
If it must arrive regardless of circumstances you can generally just send it via fax (except for mail-in ballots of course).
Though this has also lead to some issues. Because the 2025 election was a snap election there was significantly less time for mail-in ballots to be sent. This caused issues for many expats living outside Germany and as a result, at least a couple thousand votes from 200,000 registered expats were probably discarded.
Edit: ¹ any more than a system relying on the date on the postage stamp?
how would it be subject to abuse
are you really struggling to understand how it could be subject to abuse lol maybe the person in charge of the post office lives in an area they know would vote a certain way so they give everyone a day off and the mail arrives too late to be counted
I still don’t see how stamping immediately could reduce the risk of abuse.
Anyone intent on doing so in a position of power can still do so. Maybe they have a stamp for a future date, maybe they “lose” certain mail, maybe they do not empty any of those election mail boxes the week before an election.
you specifically said you dont see how it would be subject to abuse, not that [different thing than what i was talking about] is less risk prone
I mean, everything is subject to abuse. The relevant factor is the likelihood and difficulty of such abuse, isn’t it? And I don’t really see how using the stamped date as an authority reduces either or how not doing so increases either. The way you’d commit abuse changes, sure, but doesn’t make abuse any easier/harder in my opinion, just different.
again, youre just talking about something entirely different. you said you dont see how a certain system was subject to abuse and i made up a possible way. all this talk about some system being more or less subject to abuse than another has nothing to do with the fact you said you couldnt see how a certain system was subject to abuse. i am not making a claim about any system being better than another so i have no idea why youre bringing that up
How is that different from your current system, though? Couldn’t the same postal worker just delay the stamping by one day, or stamp tomorrows date onto today’s letters?
The advantage of our system is, that we know the results in the night of the election. How would that work if letters arriving a week later would still count? On the other hand, we don’t have such a huge problem with voter suppression as the US: No gerrymandering, no need to register to vote, polling stations are accessible at reasonable times without long queues etc.
Please don’t imagined this couldn’t happen. Germany is not without active political threats. When a system can be abused it’s only a meter of time before it is.
The difference is that in a system where the standard is set to postmarked upon arrival it requires an active deviation from protocol that is more discoverable and potentially an illegal offense. It’s not bullet proof, but more difficult to manipulate intentionally or unintentionally on a large scale.
Intentionally delaying a mailing is already a crime in itself. And if you already have the power to shut down a mailing hub for a day or two without abyone noticing, I don’t see how it would be more difficult to change the date in the stamping machine.
I have no doubt that, when the Nazis come to power here as well, they will use all measures to suppress free voting. We of all people know how that works. But in that case, using the stamping date for mail-in voting won’t stop them anyway, as that’s a simple law, that can simply be changed by the people in power. Case in point: This very article about changing the postmark application rules. It seems, they didn’t even have to change a law for that, just some USPS internal guidelines.
how is what different than whos current system? i merely just gave a quick idea for how this one could be open to abuse and am making zero claims for any sort of postal system being better/worse than any other
how is what different than whos current system?
The US system, using the date of the stamp instead of the arrival date. Neither system is safe from abuse. It’s just different.
Mail-in voting is inherently more error prone than voting in person. That’s why it’s important to make in person voting as accessible as possible. Voting on a Sunday, having plentiful accessible polling stations without significant waiting time surely helps, and is a reason why the share of voting by mail is traditionally way lower here in Germany than in the US. I never had to wait for more than 2 minutes at a polling station here in Germany.
Have a nice new year’s eve and guten Rutsch, as we say here.
If a black* person hands in a letter to guarantee that it’s received on time, and the worker is racist and believes it a tax form, they could just leave it for a few days/weeks before processing to guarantee that it’s late.
*Replace with any marginalised group or person. It could even include you.
In Germany, you usually don’t hand in letters, nor does the postman collect letters at your home. You throw them into a post box on the main street, which is emptied once or twice a day. So by the time the postal worker collects the mail they don’t have any means to know who posted which letter.
For really important mail you also have the option to use “Einschreiben” (registered mail) where the recipient has to sign that they received the letter.
Jesus Christ… More bullshit conservative nonsense?? Come on.
1117 days 5 hours 35 minutes to go until this administration ends
wait it’s- it’s only been one year of US’s conservative administration?.. fucking hell, i kept thinking to myself “wow, a lot has happened, thankfully that means a lot of time has passed, and a new government is going to get picked soon:)”
You still believe they will just leave after the next election? That’s cute.
