I have never had problems with my USPS route carrier. He is a pleasant enough guy, and I usually don’t see mail misdelivered to my address. That is not to say the post office is infallible. I know friends and neighbors who have had problems with the officials at the Lutherville- Timonium post office, but that has never been my experience, up until recently. Granted my issues are still not with the local post office, they have been pleasant and have tried to be helpful, but I cannot say that good experience has extended to the USPS as a whole.
I waited forty-one days for a package to arrive after being sent from Utah. Now the USPS website states that packages normally take eight days to reach their destination, and even taking into consideration the pandemic, forty-one days is incredible. I tried to follow the parcel’s progress on the USPS tracking system, but there were long periods of time that showed no activity at all. Even after the package reached a Washington, DC, distribution center, it took seventeen days for the package to reach my home!
These types of issues are not an outlier according to a recent article in the Baltimore Sun. They report that some residents in Dundalk are not seeing any mail deliveries to their homes for two or three weeks at a time. One resident from Federal Hill waited ten days for a car title to reach him from a sister in New Jersey. It has gotten so bad that Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger has investigated the situation, and the congressman cited an internal memo from the postal service urging employees to leave mail behind if it might delay them. He blames the newly appointed postmaster general for many of the problems. Others, like S. David Fineman, a former chairman of the board of governors of the USPS, state that political interference is harming the operation of the postal service. For example, congress passed a law in 2006 that included, among other things, that USPS prefund its pension obligations for 75 years. Fineman points out that no private company has a similar obligation, and that type of requirement means money that would normally go to day to day operations are directed instead toward pension obligations. The former chairman of the board of governors also points out that Treasury released $10 billion already allocated to the USPS recently but placed many strings on the money, such as details of contracts it negotiates with many shippers. Fineman concludes that the USPS is losing billions because of the pandemic, and that it will run out of money unless congress steps in to save the day.
The above brings me to the point of this commentary- don’t be sure that the nation is ready for a vote by mail election in November. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy states that the USPS “has ample capacity to deliver all election mail securely and on time …and we will do so.” My personal experience makes me question that declaration. At the time of this writing, Governor Hogan has just approved a State Board of Elections plan to provide for 360 voting centers, primarily located at public high schools across the state. In addition, absentee ballot applications will be mailed to all voters in the state. I would urge all who vote by absentee ballot to get their ballot in the mail exceedingly early or personally deliver the absentee ballots to drop boxes that the Board of Elections will place at variously yet to be identified sites. The USPS is already under much strain, and the more time they have for delivery of these ballots the better.
Eric Rockel
Vice President, GTCC