THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
FRIDAY, MARCH 2, 2012
PAGE 7A
Post office closings may skew mail-in ballots
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Elections officials in several states are concerned that the closing of mail-processing centers and post offices could disrupt vote-by-mail baloting this year, a potential problem that has led some members of Congress to call for a delay until after the November elections.
The U.S. Postal Service recently announced that it is moving ahead with plans to close at least 223 processing centers and thousands of post offices, adding to the 153 centers and 965 post offices that have closed since 2008. The moves are part of a wide-ranging cost-cutting strategy for an agency that estimates it will lose up to $18 billion a year by 2015.
Voting officials are raising a variety of concerns,depending on the circumstances in their states.Meanwhile,postal customers have security concerns about leaving ballots in their mailboxes to be picked up by postal carriers.
In California and Arizona, officials say the closing of processing centers could delay the delivery of mail in ballots beyond the deadline to have them counted.
The state registrar in Ohio wrote the postmaster general with concerns about ensuring the security of ballots sent to processing centers that will be across state lines.
"We just have to have a moratorium through this presidential year to avoid disastrous consequences," said California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who wrote a letter last week to the postmaster general urging a halt to the closures until after the November election. "I'm asking for a time-out."
In Oregon, the first state to require vote-by-mail, the state registrar says voters in rural areas where post offices are scheduled to be closed may have nowhere nearby to drop off their ballots. That would be especially problematic for those who have become accustomed to mailing them on the final weekend.
Mail is deposited into an outdoor postal box Feb. 4 in Sacramento, Calif. Elections officials in several states are concerned that the closing of mail-processing centers and post offices could disrupt vote-by-mail balloting.
well-equipped to deal with the changes, in part because they have such extensive experience with mail voting.
But officials dismissed concerns raised in other states, saying they're
LEGAL
The Postal Service has said the next round of facilities won't close until August, and it would then halt the process temporarily at the end of the month to minimize disruptions ahead of the general election.
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The agency might begin its closures in states that already have held their primaries, Postal Service spokeswoman Patricia Licata said. She acknowledged that the consolidation will lead to longer delivery times but dismissed concerns that it could disenfranchise voters.
"We realize that election mail is vital to the country, and we don't want to do anything to disrupt that," she said.
Mindful of the concerns back home, some members of Congress say they plan to ask for another delay, after the Postal Service agreed last year to a five-month moratorium on the closures that ends in mid-May.
According to the Postal Service, once the moratorium lifts, the earliest a mail processing center could close would be August, partly because the mail agency must work to reassign employees. The first mail processing centers to be affected, which are yet to be determined, would be a handful of places involving the least difficulty in transferring employees.
Montana Sen. Jon Tester, a Democrat who sits on the committee that oversees the agency, is working to minimize the effects of the cuts. Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden said he plans to file an amendment seeking to delay the closures until after the presidential election. He said they would disproportionately affect rural voters.
"Closing these facilities carries many unintended consequences," Wyden, a Democrat, said in a statement last week. "It is not a risk worth taking."
Congress is expected to take up the overhaul of the Postal Service in the coming weeks.
Postal closures are unpopular with constituents, but spokeswoman Shannan Velayas said California's secretary of state Bowen is concerned only with the integrity of elections and that her letter to the postmaster general was not politically motivated.
While voting by mail has been mandatory in Oregon since 2000, it is growing nationwide.
One in five voters cast ballots by mail in 2010, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, up from one in eight in 2004. In some states, such as Washington, ballots must be merely postmarked by Election Day to count.
In others, they must be received by the time polls close.
Charles Henze, who has voted by mail in California since he first registered, said the cutbacks have him considering whether to get off the permanent absentee voter rolls this year.
The Postal Service changes worry some voters, who wonder if their ballots will be delivered in time or whether they will have a convenient way to mail them.
Henze, 46, likes to wait until the last minute to cast his vote. Now that he may have to mail his ballot sooner, he is leaning toward voting in person at his polling place in the eastern San Francisco Bay area city of Pleasanton.
It's a somewhat different concern for Nancy Bowers, who lives on a farm outside Fort Rock, Ore., where the post office is under review for closure. She is worried there will not be a drop box close enough to make voting convenient.
"With primaries in particular, by the time you get to voting, the situation can have changed," he said.
Fort Rock, about 60 miles south of Bend in central Oregon, is nine miles from Bowers' farm. She said if the post office closes, she would have to drive at least 20 miles to drop off
"If they make us go somewhere else, some people may have to drive 50 miles," said Bowers, 65. "They'll consider not voting. A lot of people will."
a ballot. For the November general election, that could mean driving in snow.
Oregon Secretary of State Kate Brown is considering asking county registrars to establish more ballot drop-boxes at libraries and other public buildings, including shuttered post offices.
In Arizona, where more than 1 million residents voted absentee last year, election officials are advising residents to get their ballots in the mail by the Wednesday before an election. Pima County Recorder F. Ann Rodriguez said the change could have the biggest effect on residents of Indian reservations and others in rural areas who only make weekly trips to town to pick up mail.
"We're going to have to go back and educate voters," she said.
Delays are among the concerns of Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted,
who sent a letter about the processing center closures last week to the postmaster general. He expressed concern that Ohio ballots could pass through out-of-state processing centers on the way to and from voters.
His spokesman, Matt McClellan, said the longer trip increases the risk of ballots being damaged, lost or delayed. McClellan said those concerns would be magnified in a presidential election year, when the number of voters and mail-in ballots is highest.
"A ballot leaving the state by its very nature is a problem," Husted said in a follow-up telephone interview.
California poses a special problem because of its sheer size.
The Postal Service has closed four processing centers in the state since 2008 and plans to close 14 more. Some county registrars said the closures already have had an effect.
The secretary of state said mailed ballots took from five to seven days to arrive at county election offices during last year's local elections in areas that lost distribution centers, rather than the normal one to three days.
Gail Pellerin, president of California's county clerks association, said postal cutbacks had delayed ballot delivery and were a major reason some absentee votes went uncounted last year. Pellerin said she has noticed that some voters have begun using private package companies such as FedEx to overnight their ballots.
"There's nothing worse than having to timestamp those in as too late?" she said.
Sheriff's probe reveals Obama's birth certificate as forgery
Ariz. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is surrounded by media yesterday as he waits to announce the preliminary findings of his cold case investigation into the authenticity of President Barack Obama's birth certificate.
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America's self-proclaimed toughest sheriff finds himself entangled these days in his own thorny legal troubles: a federal grand jury probe over alleged abuse of power, Justice Department accusations of racial profiling and revelations that his department didn't adequately investigate hundreds of Arizona sex-crime cases.
Rather than seek cover, though, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is seeking to grab the spotlight in the same unorthodox fashion that has helped boost his career as a nationally known lawman.
Arpaio on Thursday unveiled preliminary results of an investigation, conducted by members of his volunteer cold-case pose, into the authenticity of President Barack Obama's birth certificate, a controversy that has been widely debunked but which remains alive in the eyes of some conservatives.
At a news conference, Arpaio said the probe revealed that there was
probable cause to believe Obama's long-form birth certificate released by the White House in April is a computer-generated forgery. He also said the selective service card completed by Obama in 1980 in Hawaii also was most likely a forgery.
"We don't know who the perpetrators are of these documents." Arpaio said, although he said he doesn't think the president forged the documents.
Earlier, the 79-year-old Republican sheriff defended his need to spearhead such an investigation after nearly 250 people connected to an Arizona tea party group requested one last summer.
"I'm not going after Obama," said Arpaio, who has criticized the president's administration for cutting off his federal immigration powers and conducting a civil rights investigation of his office. "I'm just doing my job."
Some critics suggest Arpaio's aim is to divert attention from his own legal troubles while raising his political profile as he seeks a sixth term this
year. The sheriff vehemently denies such strategies are in play.
"You say I need this to get elected? Are you kidding me? I've been elected five times. I don't need this," he said in a recent interview.
Democratic state Sen. Steve Gallardo said Paioa is pandering to relentless critics of the president.
"It doesn't matter what President Obama does, they'll never support him," Gallardo said. "It's those folks who will continue to write checks to Sheriff Joe because of this stuff."
Arpaio's probe comes amid a federal grand jury investigation into the sheriff's office on criminal abuse-of-power allegations since at least December 2009, focusing on the sheriff's anti-public corruption squad. Separately, the U.S. Justice Department has accused Arpaio's office of racially profiling Latinos, basing immigration enforcement on racially charged citizen complaints and punishing Hispanic jail inmates for speaking Spanish. Arpaio denies the allegations and said the investigation is politically motivated.
VOLUNTEERING
Joplin survivors learn from New Orleans
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NEW ORLEANS — The group came to help rebuild a city still struggling to find its way more than six years after Hurricane Katrina, and to learn some disaster recovery lessons they can take back to their own storm-ravaged Missouri community.
A 14-hour bus ride and 715 miles from home, the bleary-eyed bank executives, hospital administrators and church workers from Joplin, Mo., spent much of Thursday wielding paint brushes, sledgehammers and crowbars.
They made the trip to New Orleans to hear what has worked — and what hasn't — in the Louisiana city's long, slow return since Katrina. Joplin is undergoing its own recovery from a massive tornado that struck last May.
"It's our job to learn these tools and pass it forward," said Jerred Hogan, a Joplin landscape surveyor who helped create Rebuild Joplin, the nonprofit group sponsoring the trip. "There's healing in those tools."
But first, he and the others were hard at work to help renovate and gut a pair of homes in the Gentilly and Mid-City neighborhoods under the guidance of the St. Bernard Project, a nonprofit based in the neighboring parish that has rebuilt hundreds of homes throughout New Orleans.
The New Orleans group has brought Rebuild Joplin under its corporate mantle. It's a partnership meant to overcome geographic distance, cultural differences and community size — all in the name of creating a template that organizers hope will help other cities recover from natural disasters in the future.
"This is totally unique," said Zach Rosenburg, a former Washington, D.C., lawyer who helped start the St. Bernard Project after relocating
to New Orleans following his Katrina volunteer stint in the summer of 2006. "We have a community that has been devastated themselves investing in us."
The admiration and sense of shared obligation is reciprocal. Not just between Joplin and New Orleans, but as part of a broader network of places trying to recover from tragedy.
On the long bus ride south earlier
this week, the two dozen Joplin residents watched an inspirational video featuring the New York Says Thank You Foundation, a group started in 2003 by a Manhattan venture capitalist whose business partner died on the top floor of the World Trade Center in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. and who wanted to return the nation's kindness while promoting volunteerism.
Don's Auto Center
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