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.
This is just the start of Republicans rigging the 2026 midterms even more to prevent the huge sweep that is going to happen.
They tried really hard to throw away 60,000 votes in NC to steal a seat from the Democratic winner, but finally lost after a 8 month battle.
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
They just need to ruin fucking everything.
It’s the Republican way, destroy America.
That I’m okay with; death to america.
It’s that they’re killing the post office not the cops
They’d rather rule over the ashes than not at all.
They aren’t thinking that far ahead, but if they did; yes.
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?
Connect is great. Been using it since I moved to Lemmy. Never used sync though so there may be features in not aware of that you’re expecting.
I predict the regional processing centres in blue states will have technical issues for weeks before and after the voting period.
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.
The Blind Leading The Naked
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.
people should be filing thier taxes electronically , in this case.
oh don’t get me started. they just took away freefile.
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.
They keep changing as many laws and regulations as possible so come next election, no poor person will be able to vote at all anymore. And if that isn’t enough to make them win, they will buy as many officials as possible to make sure the count is “right”. And if that isn’t enough they will contest every Democrat win in every state. I’m sure the list goes on.
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.
It’s not a secret. Just nobody in any leadership position seems willing/able to do anything about it
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
