For many years the USPS has scanned and imaged EVERY piece of mail that has gone through their system. From a technology viewpoint and especially now with AI it is a no-brainer to go back through previous elections and figure out exactly what fraud occurred.
For you nerds:
Mail Isolation Control and Tracking (MICT)
MICT photographs the outside of virtually every letter and flat mailpiece processed by the USPS. The system captures images of:
Recipient address
Return address
Postmark information
Envelope exterior
It does not photograph or read the contents of sealed mail. The information collected is essentially the “metadata” on the outside of the envelope.
Why Was It Created?
MICT was developed after the 2001 anthrax mail attacks, which killed five people, including two postal workers. The USPS wanted a way to trace mail pieces through the system and identify potentially hazardous mail.
How Long Has It Been In Use?
The program was created in the aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks and has been operating for more than two decades. Its existence became widely known in 2013 when the FBI and USPS publicly acknowledged it.
Was USPS Imaging Mail Before 2001?
Yes.
The imaging technology itself is much older. USPS automated sorting machines called Multiline Optical Character Readers (MLOCRs) have been capturing images of mailpieces for address recognition and sorting since the early 1990s. The associated Remote Bar Coding System (RBCS) has been in use since 1992.
In other words:
1992: USPS begins large-scale imaging of mail for automated sorting and address recognition.
2001: MICT is created following the anthrax attacks to facilitate tracing and tracking of mail.
2013: USPS publicly confirms that images of the exterior of essentially all processed mail are being captured.
An Interesting Side Note
The consumer service called Informed Delivery uses the same mail imaging infrastructure. When you receive an email showing images of today’s incoming mail, those images are generally being pulled from the mail-processing images already captured by USPS sorting equipment.
Given your background in large-scale data systems, you’d probably appreciate the scale of this operation: USPS processes well over 100 billion pieces of mail annually, and the imaging systems have effectively created one of the largest address-recognition and mail-tracking infrastructures ever built.
I have Informed Delivery, I get an email every morning with picture of all mail that will be delivered that day, and also tracking numbers of any packages that are in the system and when they should be delivered.
I x-gf always bitches cause her PO box is 20 miles away and she never knows if she should drive to the post office.
I have told her to get informed delivery and then she would know, but while you can enlighten a female, you cannot force them to act in any rational way