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USPS slide/information: With PMG DeJoy testifying today and all the noise around “machines being removed” I thought it might be helpful to provide a bit of background gained through working with the USPS in the past. The facilities in question are “Processing and Distribution Centers” or P&DCs, of which there are about 270 scattered around the country. They are basically sorting hubs for the three types of mail USPS handles, letter mail, flats (magazines and catalogs), and parcels. One or more sets of automated machines inside each P&DC handle each mail piece, doing two basic functions but I’ll just describe letter mail handling as that’s what is in the news:

1. Cancelling, orienting, and automatically reading the address of each letter using optical character recognition. (Yes even MY crummy handwriting!) Within milliseconds after the OCR verifies the address against their database of all possible addresses, a barcode is sprayed onto the piece and continues down the machine til it is sorted into the proper “slot” or stacker for a given zip code. All mail to each destination goes into a tray which then is shipped out. These machines are called DBCS - Deliver Bar Code Sorters and handle about 35,000 pieces of letter mail per hour. Here’s a 30 sec. video showing the DBCS in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9OUa02FUac

2. For incoming mail the opposite process happens in a similar sorting machine called the CSBCS - Carrier Sequence Bar Code Sorter. These machines put mail into the exact sequence needed by each mail carrier along their route.

Most of the work is done at night after all mail has been picked up and the “dispatch of value” occurs around 2-3 AM - basically the facility is emptied of mail and gets ready to do it all again the next day. While USPS parcel handling was far behind private companies at one time, that’s been a major source of investment and is pretty much on par. Much mail is carried by air even though “airmail” is an archaic term, and then to local postoffices by truck.

It’s hard to get objective information about USPS from public sources because most of what’s on the internet comes from blogs associated with LSM or the postal union. An example is “Motherboard” which is evidently the tech arm of Vice, a lefty outfit. But according to what I’ve read, “Motherboard identified 19 mail sorting machines from five processing facilities across the U.S. that either have already been removed or are scheduled to be in the near future.” USPS Officials have said machines are being upgraded (such as to add more sorting destinations), or to move equipment to facilities where it is most needed. Even the postal workers Motherboard spoke to said having machines removed, replaced, or modified is nothing new, but this time it seems to be more widespread, include a larger number of machines at their respective facility, and potentially impacts the facility’s ability to process large numbers of mail, including ballots, in a short time span.

I think we can see this is more about “feels” than facts. The Postmaster General has said there’s sufficient capacity to handle mail volumes including mail voting. Let me just hypothetically say that if a mail-in ballot was a larger format, like a magazine-size, it would go through flat sorters and never touch the DBCS. I have no idea what the ballot looks like or what the capacity utilization of the DBCS machines in those five facilities is, but at 35,000 letters per hour, they are able to handle the Christmas mail influx and other surge conditions like near election times.

Here’s the article from what seems to be a biased source: http://www.postal-reporter.com/blog/the-post-office-is-deactivating-mail-sorting-machines-ahead-of-the-election/

19 machines is almost insignificant by Postal Reporter’s own admission, from an article they published in 2007: “The DBCS is the most widely deployed mail-processing platform for letters within the Postal Service with more than 6,000 machines operating nationwide.” At that time USPS just odered 110 new ones from Siemens for $55M, having purchased 211 new machines the year before. Any machine that runs 35,000 pieces per hour is eventually going to wear out and need to be removed from service and refurbished or replaced.

And for anyone wishing to know more about the entire P&DC process, this 10 minute USPS video explains it all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX16-52bHvg

Hope this is helpful to those wondering how to make sense of the noise democraps are making about the USPS.