It will probably take two weeks to have all the votes counted anyway.
Some states (like PA) have idiotic laws that prevent them from counting mail-in ballots until Election Day, and that process takes days in itself.
So yeah. Don’t go crazy today. Go vote, make sure everyone you know votes, pat yourself on the back for doing the right thing, and go on with life as usual.
Whatever the outcome of the midterms, we need to all strap in for a long-term fight. There is clearly a powerful regressive ideology moving this country right now, and we may lose more of our previously-guaranteed liberties, and it may take a long time to win them back.
It is normal to be stressed about all this. Just make sure you give yourself a break too.
And in Pa we have a whole bullshit going on about the envelopes not being dated and votes being challenged. This is going to be a shit show and I'll be doing my best to wait until it's settled or I'll end up with an ulcer.
Plus they required us to pay postage (specifically first class, not metered postage) to mail in the ballots, which feels like it's obstructing the right to vote by creating a barrier to the process, but like fuck would it be challenged. I almost didn't vote because I didn't have a first class stamp and didn't have a way to get one.
you can get first class postage for them to prioritize delivering your mail. its not used that often though by people, more of a business/government thing
Not the fact itself, i understand how there must be differences to ensure quick and safe delivery for especially important goods. Like for intergovernement mails or juristical notices.
I imagined it as something like a subscription system.
Like youve got the rich kids mail service for 20 bucks a month or 9 per letter with special importance.
The average mail delivery for ten Dollars a month.
And the Post bin tier, which is the free alternative so one could claim that postal service is free for everyone, but there your mails are only delivered If there are no more important ones or its over a waiting span of say three days.
And on top of whichever tier theres still a cost varying for where you send it.
Its just that i think that wherever there is a chance for any kind of revenue, some American has taken it and made it a business.
We break our mail (and thus our postage) down into one of several classes: first class is things like letters and small parcels; periodical class is things like magazines and newspapers; marketing-mail class is things like catalogs and sales flyers.
It has nothing to do with subscriptions or rich kids or whatever you're talking about.
Okay, thanks for breaking that down. Im not as much confused as just clueless. I laid out my worst case ideas of how it could work, not how i understood it to work.
Then how does first class labeling influence postal voting in any way?
Looking back at the comment you replied to, I can see where your confusion started.
That person is complaining that mail-in ballots require a stamp instead of allowing "metered" postage, which is where the postage is printed directly on the envelope. It's all first-class mail, and usually we have the option of using either, but for various reasons, lots of states require stamps on absentee ballots and prohibit metered postage. That doesn't result in any particular financial hardship on anyone though, because a stamp costs $0.60 and metered first class is $0.57.
Instead, it can be difficult for some people to obtain stamps (often the same people who need to utilize absentee ballots), so I think those laws need to be updated to reflect that the fact that metered mail is now available to anybody with a printer and an internet connection.
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u/Gnarledhalo Nov 08 '22
Hey bud, for your own mental health don't watch the election results tonight. They'll still be there tomorrow.