SALEM TOWNSHIP, MICH (Michigan News Source) – If you take a trip to Salem Township, Michigan, a small community that’s about 25 minutes northeast of Ann Arbor, you probably shouldn’t make the trip inside of an envelope because your postal recipient will most likely have to clock a 14-mile round trip to pick you up.

According to Bridge Michigan, David Stacer, who once enjoyed a quick stroll to his PO box, will now be navigating downtown traffic and construction to pick up his mail. Why? Because the contract postal unit that served his area is closing, and nobody at USPS seems interested in explaining why.

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Salem Township isn’t alone though. The USPS has cut the number of contract and village post offices by 20% since 2019, citing “oversight and customer service issues.” Meanwhile, the postal service is on track to lose $8 billion this fiscal year. For those keeping score, that’s an impressive level of incompetence even by government standards.

And spoiler alert: there’s an election coming up – which means that the inefficiencies of the USPS could spell disaster this election cycle. Thursday, September 26th is the day that absentee ballots go out in Michigan. After that, they get filled out and mailed back and have to be in the hands of election officials by 5 p.m. on November 4th. In the 2020 presidential election, 58% of Michigan voters used absentee ballots to cast their votes – approximately 3.2 million.

Postal panic: election officials sound the alarm on USPS failures ahead of voting season.

In a report out of Just the News, according to election officials nationwide, the mail system’s chronic incompetence threatens to derail the upcoming elections. In a scathing letter to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, top election administrators didn’t mince words: they’ve “not seen improvement” in USPS’s handling of election mail. The problems? Ballots postmarked on time are arriving too late to count, and mail with valid addresses is bouncing back as undeliverable. These aren’t one-off mistakes, the election officials say, but a pervasive issue that has them sweating bullets.

The USPS’s response? Crickets. They’re busy losing billions of dollars and shutting down local post offices, which has left folks from Salem Township in Michigan and the rest of the country scrambling for answers – and their mail.

And let’s not forget the elderly folks who depend on these postal units for essential deliveries, like medication. “I’ve got elderly people that need their medicines,” said Township Supervisor Gary Whitaker, who offered a solution that USPS promptly ignored.

The Postal Service has other plans. What are they? Slow down rural mail delivery even further and prioritize urban areas near large processing facilities. Customer service from the USPS appears to some to be defined as making the people who need it most wait longer.

Delivering disappointment, one stamp at a time.

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The USPS’s struggles aren’t just limited to election-related mail or the state of Michigan. This is a nationwide calamity. The service is hemorrhaging money, unable to adapt to the digital age, and still clinging to outdated business practices say critics. Remember when stamp collectors were a thing? Yeah, they’re vanishing faster than the USPS’s relevance. And the price of a first-class stamp is now almost as much as the Pumpkin Spice Frappuccino at Starbucks.

Linda Hamilton, who ran the soon-to-be-closed Salem postal facility, has seen business dwindle over the last decade. With fewer people buying stamps and more opting for digital alternatives, revenue has dried up, and USPS’s response has been, predictably, to cut services further. The strategy seems to be: if you can’t beat the competition, just make it harder for everyone to use your service.

The road ahead: more cuts.

As if slashing services and delaying mail weren’t enough, the USPS is also considering a new “service slowdown.” Residents in rural areas might have to wait an extra day for their mail, while those closer to major processing centers will receive theirs faster.

The timing couldn’t be worse, with critical mail-in ballots set to pile up just before the November elections. DeJoy insists the slowdown will start post-election, but can we really take his word for it? The USPS track record isn’t promising. Are they going to be ready in Michigan and around the country for the upcoming onslaught of absentee ballots that are going to hit them?

Whatever happened to “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds”? Nowadays, it’s more like, “We’ll get there when we get there – maybe.”

Update 10/09/24:

According to Bridge Michigan, the U.S. Postal Service has reversed its decision to close a contract postal unit in Salem Township, Michigan, following public outcry and intervention from U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell.