Postal Delays Become Nation’s Newest Voting Requirement

Postal officials have discovered democracy’s missing safeguard: requiring voters to defeat the mail system before their opinions become legally valid. The breakthrough follows reports that California rejected more than 148,000 ballots from its June primary, with 63% arriving too late despite a seven-day grace period. Hundreds of Wisconsin ballots also missed deadlines, while election officials in Michigan and Kansas have advised voters to bypass the institution specifically assigned to deliver their ballots. Election experts hailed the arrangement as a patriotic obstacle course ensuring that representation goes primarily to citizens with reliable transportation, flexible work schedules and graduate-level knowledge of regional processing centers.

President Donald Trump praised the system for distinguishing robust ballots from weak envelopes. “A vote should have to work very hard, frankly, much harder than other votes, and if it gets lost for three weeks, maybe it wasn’t a strong vote,” Trump said. His March executive order seeks a national voter list to help determine who may receive mail ballots, adding a helpful federal checkpoint to the reckless old practice of letting states administer elections under language found in an obscure eighteenth-century pamphlet called the Constitution. Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin has warned that the proposal could worsen delays or prevent eligible Americans from voting, overlooking the settled democratic principle that eligibility is merely the first draft of citizenship. The final exam is successfully mailing an envelope through a system that sometimes needs a week to move it across town.

Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab previously joked that the Pony Express was more efficient, a comparison postal planners treated as a procurement recommendation. Horses, after all, provided the premium nineteenth-century election infrastructure required by a country determined to verify signatures, enforce deadlines and count votes before anyone can ask why a birthday card took 11 days to travel 40 miles. Under the modernized system, results may remain uncertain until every ballot has arrived, been rejected or established permanent residency in a processing center several states away. A ballot that cannot survive the Postal Service has therefore failed the nation’s most rigorous voter identification test.

* None of the quotes in this article were spoken by an actual person. More info.