Washington, D.C. (ECWd) –
The Official Court Docket indicates that Judge Sullivan entered the attached draft order and ordered USPS to take extraordinary measures to ensure that ballots remaining at USPS facilities are delivered to polling offices/election officials by end of today.
IT IS ORDERED:
“Beginning no later than 12:30 PM EST today, Defendants shall send Postal Service inspectors or their designees, to processing facilities in the following Districts and direct them to sweep the facilities between 12:30 PM EST and 3:00 PM EST to ensure that no ballots have been held up and that any identified ballots are immediately sent out for delivery: Central Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Detroit, Colorado/Wyoming, Atlanta, Houston, Alabama, Northern New England, Greater South Carolina, South Florida, Lakeland, and Arizona. Alternatively, Defendants may satisfy this paragraph if inspectors from the USPS Office of Inspector General (“OIG”) are available to oversee the sweep of processing facilities described in the previous sentence. No later than 4:30 PM EST today, Defendants shall file a status update certifying compliance with this paragraph upon confirming, in the most efficient manner available, that sweeps were conducted and that no ballots were left behind. To be clear, the inspectors themselves need not provide any certifications to the Court.”
“No later than 4:30 PM EST today, Defendants shall identify the 27 processing centers at which the OIG was onsite and the list of facilities that the Postal Inspectors have observed since October 19, 2020, unless OIG raises an objection to the identification of these sites.”
gov.uscourts.dcd.221243.68.0
2 Comments
Roger
Posted at 10:58h, 04 NovemberAn impossible task on such short notice (same day) by the Judge. They would have to _immediately notify and fly in_ Postal Inspectors from around the country on same day notice, to have at least two (2) per processing facility.
Meanwhile, mail processing is a 24 hour a day operation. Day shift, starting at 8 am, takes the incoming mail, sorted into 3 digit zip codes, and runs it to break it down into 5 digit zip codes for the evening and night shift to sort into carrier delivery sequence for the larger cities/towns. Smaller cities/towns have the mail consolidated into trays and loaded into containers for dispatch for carriers to hand-sort it into delivery-sequence.
Our plant averaged 1.2 million incoming letters processed by the day shift on 5 machines each day. Meanwhile, the mail picked up in the blue boxes starts to trickle in around 4 pm. (Mail picked up by letter carriers on their routes and the last of the blue box collection mail comes in around 6 pm) After larger non-machinable mail is pulled out, the letters go into a machine that (1) checks for biological agents, such as anthrax (2) faces the mail so mail is aligned facing the same direction (3) cancels the stamps and applies the postmark (4) photographs/reads the address and applies the zip+4 bar code on the front and a unique orange ID tag for tracing purposes on the back (5) separates mail for in-house and outgoing (sorted to first 3 digits of zip code) processing by the shift coming in at 4 pm. Mail for other plants/states start departing at 11 pm.
The night shift starts at 9 pm to have all the mail, letters and parcels sorted and staged in containers at the dock doors for transport to the stations beginning at 5 am.
jannie
Posted at 16:43h, 03 Novemberinteresting