Mangled Remains Of A Christmas Card Got Delivered A Month After The Holiday, But I’m To Believe The USPS Can Handle My Ballot?

While retrieving a couple of days’ worth of mail over the weekend, I discovered a curious delivery in my box. It was a Christmas gift card that I had been waiting for but never received.

It was actually a mangled envelope, which had once contained a Christmas card. The stamp was stamped with a random stamp. “DELIVER TO ADDRESSEE WITHOUT CONTENTS” message, and then stuffed in a baggie sealed by the United States Postal Service with a preprinted apology message.

“WE CARE,” The government courier assured me that despite the lack of evidence, it was true before I wrote:

Dear Postal Customer

We are sorry for the damage caused to your mail by the Postal Service. We apologize for any inconvenience this caused. We understand that your mail is important and you have every right expect it to arrive in good condition.

Despite every effort to avoid damage to mail, sometimes this is inevitable due to the large volume of mail handled and the fast processing methods that must be used to ensure the fastest distribution.

We hope you understand…

Sincerely,

Your Postmaster

It’s a bit frustrating that my dear, faraway friend spent some 60-odd cents to send me an empty, torn-open envelope that was dropped off in a sandwich bag a month after Christmas (and, the way people time their seasonal greetings, probably two months after it was supposed to arrive). I still love my friend. “understand,” Mr. Postmaster, that life isn’t perfect. Our world is crazy and fallen, with both human and machine error. The USPS isn’t exempt, and neither am I.

However, I understand that my Christmas cards are the least-risk mail that the Postal Service has to handle. Ranking above them are sympathy cards and cash-carrying birthday notes, followed by wedding invitations and paychecks, tax documents, passports and immigration papers, and — crucially — election ballots.

Like my late and empty Christmas envelope, delayed mail-in ballots cause potential election-tipping quantities to miss deadlines. In Pennsylvania’s June 2020 primary, for instance, the pace of voting by mail kept tens of thousands of people After successfully casting a poll. More than 100,000 mail-in ballots were rejected during California’s presidential primary the same year, mostly for missing arrival or postmark deadlines. And though sometimes the ballot rejections are the fault of a voter’s procrastination, as NPR reported in a 2020 article titled “Signed, Sealed, Undelivered,” Vote-by mail failures are “often through no fault of the voter.”

New York City’s disastrous 2020 Democratic primary offers another cautionary tale about voting-by-Post Office. As my colleague John Daniel Davidson reported It was:

[T]For the June 23 Democratic Primary, more than 84,000 postal ballots were thrown out by the Board of Elections. This was out of nearly 319,000 total mail-in votes, which is about 21 percent of all invalid ballots. … What’s more, it took six weeks to declare a winner In two closely viewed Democratic congressional elections