The stamp machine broke!!????? THE STAMP MACHINE BROKE???!!
That's the lamest thing I've heard in a long time! Have they ever heard of GOING TO THE POST OFFICE AND PURCHASING STAMPS!!???
Sheesh!
Ah well, at least they caught it in time. My feeling is that more conservatives vote via absentee than libs.
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Pennsylvania is having problems with absentee ballot issues because of the legal fight from Democrats aimed at Ralph Nader
"Stamp Machine" is a misnomer. Actually, these machines sort the mail by zip, stamp it (in the sense of an ink imprint, not lick-and-stick), place a bar code on the bottom which is readable by the post office's sorting machines and bundle the results. Therefore, the sender gets a break on the postage, since much of the presorting has been done by the sender. The machine counts how many envelopes were stamped and that is verified by the post office.
The discounts scale with the level of the sorting. A few years ago, if you pre-sorted down to the zip+4 the rate was a mere 17.5 cents. So a failure of the machine meant that even sorting and stamping by hand (or lick-n-stick), the office took a huge financial hit to their mail budget.
The machine where I work sorts/stamps over 400,000 bills per month, and has to be taken down every 2 months for up to 3 days of routine maintenance. This causes a backup of up to 20,000 bills per day. Needless to say, developing a plan to deal with this has become high on managment's "to do" list.