Mail delays even worse across Pa., with 42% of Philly mail taking longer than 5 days

[brooklynite]

Source: Patriot-News

Timely mail delivery across Pennsylvania took a drastic turn for the worse in just the last two weeks amid a glut of voting by mail, according to U.S. Postal Service data filed Wednesday in federal court.

In Philadelphia, 42% of all first-class mail is taking longer than five days to be delivered. For comparison, that figure was 33% two weeks ago and just 13% in January, before a series of changes handed down by the Trump administration led to a national slowdown.

Central Pennsylvania, the subject of a PennLive investigation last week, also saw a sharp decline. At the start of the year, just 7% of mail failed to meet the 5-day standard. Today, more than 30% of mail is being substantially delayed.

The delays were obvious enough already that state officials advised voters Tuesday to hand-deliver mail-in ballots rather than risk missing the deadline for votes to be counted. That was before the USPS released the latest data, in accordance with a court order in a federal lawsuit lodged by a voting advocacy group.

Read more: https://www.pennlive.com/news/2020/10/mail-delays-even-worse-across-pa-with-42-of-philly-mail-taking-longer-than-5-days.html

[randr]

1. Beyond treason

Trump is at war with America

[benfranklin1776]

4. Yes he's going to replace Benedict Arnold as synonymous with vile traitor

But Arnold never answered for his crimes, escaping to Britain. It is imperative that this orange stack of offal must.

[Evolve Dammit]

2. USPS officials enabling this need to be charged and tried. All of them. Let's see who issued orders.

[dchill]

3. +1.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

6. +1

[HobbsHouse]

5. Huh, the wife and I mailed out ballots on Tuesday

2 weeks ago in the regular outgoing mail of our townhouse cluster facility as we've been doing for 20 years.
We're in a large metro area of a hotly contested, usually red-leaning state.
I checked the tracking website on Thursday, 2 days later, and both ballots had been received and accepted.
Just like every other year.

[wcast]

7. Guess you are part of the 58% that saw no delay.

Just reread your post. This is PA specific. Changes were made to delay mail in highly Democratic areas, Philly, while rural PA won’t have issues.

[modrepub]

8. More Context

Slow mail is also impacting SC PA, which is the Republican counter weight to Philadelphia. So slow mail service impacts Republican areas and may remove mailed ballots for Trump. The net may skew votes to Republicans if more Democratic voters are mailing their ballots instead of going to the polls. If Republicans are using the mail to vote, gumming up the USPS is going to reduce areas with a lot of Republican votes. Philly may be a Democratic stronghold, but there are still over 100k Republican voters in the city which is way more than what’s available in the boonies.

My guess is Republican efforts to stop counting will be reversed if Biden is running ahead by early Wednesday morning.