Exactly Who is Delivering Postal Ballots? and Do We Care?

An esteemed colleague noted the news of the USPS stopping weekend delivery, as part of a trend of slow demise of the USPS, and asked: will we get to the point where vote-by-mail is vote-by-Fedex? And would that be bad, having a for-profit entity acting as the custodian for a large chunk of the ballots in an election?

The more I thought about it, the more flummoxed I was. I had to take off the geek hat and dust off the philosopher hat, looking at the question from a viewpoint of values, rather than (as would be my wont) requirements analysis or risk analysis. I goes like this …

I think that Phil’s question is based on assumption of some shared values among voters — all voters, not just those that vote by mail — that make postal voting acceptable because ballots are a “government things” and so is postal service. Voting is in part an act of faith in government to be making a good faith effort to do the job right, and keep the operations above a minimum acceptable level of sanity. It “feels OK” to hand a marked ballot to my regular neighborhood post(wo)man, but not to some stranger dropping off a box from a delivery truck. Translate from value to feeling to expectation: it’s implied that we expect USPS staff to know that they have a special government duty in delivering ballots, and to work to honor that duty, regarding the integrity of those special envelopes as a particular trust, as well as their timely delivery.

• Having re-read all that, it sounds so very 20th century, almost as antique as lever machines for voting.

I don’t really think that USPS is “the government” anymore, not in the sense that the journey of a VBM ballot is end-to-end inside a government operation. I’m not sure that Fedex or UPS are inherently more or less trustworthy. In fact they all work for each other now! And certainly in some circumstances the for-profit operations may to some voters feel more trustworthy — whether because of bad experiences with USPS, or because of living overseas in a country that surveils US citizens and operates the postal service.

Lastly, I think that many people do share the values behind Phil’s question — I know I do. The idea makes me wobbly. I think it comes down to this:

• If you’re wobbly on for-profit VBM, then get back into the voting booth, start volunteering to help your local election officials, and if they are effectively outsourcing any election operations to for-profit voting system vendors, help them stop doing so.
• If you not wobbly, then you’re part of trend to trusting — and often doing — remote voting with significant involvement from for-profit entities – and we know where that is headed.

The issue with USPS shows that in the 21st century, any form of remote voting will involve for-profits, whether it is Fedex for VBM, or Amazon cloud services for i-voting. My personal conclusions:

• Remote voting is lower integrity no matter what, but gets more people voting because in-person voting can be such a pain.
• I need to my redouble efforts to fix the tech so that in-person voting is not only not a pain, but actually more desirable than remote voting.

— EJS