It’s a matter of state law. I think this table is up to date, but I’d also double check with elections officials in your area before I organized anything.
Cliffs: in some states it’s illegal to drop off someone else’s ballot, period. In other states only certain people can do it (i.e. a family member, someone who lives with you, or another specific person that you designate), and in still other states it’s pretty permissive. It also seems more likely to be legal if you are only dropping off a ballot for one other person (say an elderly neighbor who doesn’t drive) than if you tried to organize a big collection effort (which some states consider to be illegal ballot harvesting)
Ben Franklin became the first Postmaster General 245 years ago. Maybe we should seek out his advice on how to mail shit. Since being dead isn’t a problem, give him a twitter account or something.
It’s not staying in the local community, mail gets sent off to the processing center even if you’re sending it next door.
That center may or may not have a mail sorter now.
The other problem is there is NOWHERE near the number of people who will be counting these things versus the onslaught of ballots they will get. Hopefully states will not reveal results (LOL I know they will) until after they are counted because most likely trump is going to lead on election day. Some states don’t let them count early ballots until election day. (another thing R’s came up with to slow it all down)
at which point mass lawsuits to stop the count right then and there and every R congress will go along with it because lol dems.
Consider the recent fracas over visas for international students. Last month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced that foreigners studying at U.S. colleges and universities would lose their visas if their schools suspended in-person instruction because of the pandemic. ICE’s announcement, just weeks before the coronavirus-accelerated start of the fall semester, upset the plans of hundreds of universities and hundreds of thousands of foreign students.
The response was immediate. Dozens of states and universities filed lawsuits to block the rule. Outraged professors pledged to find ways around it. And then, eight days later, the crisis was over; the administration suddenly said that it was dropping the proposal.
By the usual measures of policy effectiveness — whether any laws passed or regulations changed — nothing happened. Yet the costs of “nothing” were immense. For a single university, analyzing the ICE rule’s effects and determining a response could easily tie up tens of administrators for 10- or 12-hour days. Multiplied by the hundreds of universities affected, it’s reasonable to believe that higher education spent tens or hundreds of thousands of staff hours coping with the rule (while schools were already beset by a public health crisis).
Even that is an underestimate: It doesn’t count work done by others, like the state attorneys general or private lawyers representing universities, who labored to prepare lawsuits that required hundreds of pages of filings. And that’s completely overlooking the emotional harm inflicted on international students facing a choice between infection and deportation. If Trump officials had specifically sought to waste universities’ time, they could not have developed a more cost-effective strategy than dashing off a policy proposal that they later abandoned without a fight.
It’s also important to remember that down ballot races are especially important this cycle because they will, in many cases, determine how electoral maps get redrawn after the 2020 census wraps up. So, in addition to deciding who controls the Presidency, voter suppression in this election is going to lock in a lot of balance of power dynamics between the two parties in other areas.
[In other words, Rs will have a lot of non Trump specific reasons to not oppose election tricks]
Everywhere I’ve ever lived the mail carrier takes the outgoing mail left in the mailbox. If there’s a slot you get a springy clamp thing (like a clothesline hanger) to clip the mail onto the slot door. Once in a while they’ll miss an outgoing letter and get it the next day.