Bunches of Mail – Including Mail-In Ballots – Found In a Rural Wisconsin Ditch

P. Gardner Goldsmith | September 23, 2020
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In Wonderland, politicians and left-leaning media mannequins tell us that the United States Postal “Service” is a paladin, an heroic white knight that magically holds America together. Mail-in ballots are essential, they say, for “our democracy” (even though the U.S. system is supposed to be a representative, constitutionally-limited, confederated republic) and for the heretofore unknown billions of citizens who can’t possibly vote in person because they’ll be evaporated by a virus that has a fatality rate comparable to that of the seasonal flu.

And many of those collectivist bloviators deride realists who note that, for ages, the semi-monopolistic, tax-subsidized “Good Ship USPS” has been financially sinking and that President Trump in June gave them a tax-backed, blow-market-rate loan of $10 billion over and above the hefty amounts of tax cash the USPS has already consumed.

But will those leftist fantasists bother noting the discovery Tuesday in Wisconsin of a cache of USPS mail – including mail-in ballots -- found dumped on the side of a rural country road?

And will they acknowledge that this is not only not the first time such “completely impervious to fraud” mail-in ballots have been discovered, but that this is the SECOND TIME IN A FEW MONTHS THIS HAS HAPPENED IN WISCONSIN?

Wisconsin’s Fox11 News reported on the Tuesday incident, noting:

The Outagamie County Sheriff's Office says three trays were found in a ditch around 8 a.m. Tuesday. The trays were near the intersection of highways 96 and CB, near the Appleton International Airport.

And Fox11 observed:

On Wednesday, a USPS spokesman said the mail included absentee ballots.

No problem. Just keep voting. It’ll work.

It’s not as if this problem with mail-based ballots was seen in April, when, as The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported:

Three tubs of ballots for Oshkosh and Appleton have been discovered at a mail processing center in Milwaukee, according to the Wisconsin Elections Commission and a state senator.

Everything’s good. The USPS is excellent. Voting isn’t open to fraud at all – especially mail-in voting.

It’s not as if RealClearPolitics’ Mark Hemingway reported in April that mail-in voting might be trouble.

Just pretend this was never published:

Between 2012 and 2018, 28.3 million mail-in ballots remain unaccounted for, according to data from the federal Election Assistance Commission. The missing ballots amount to nearly one in five of all absentee ballots and ballots mailed to voters residing in states that do elections exclusively by mail.

Totally cool. Not a worry.

States and local authorities simply have no idea what happened to these ballots since they were mailed – and the figure of 28 million missing ballots is likely even higher because some areas in the country, notably Chicago, did not respond to the federal agency’s survey questions. This figure does not include ballots that were spoiled, undeliverable, or came back for any reason.

Just keep worshipping mail-in voting, the USPS, and the tax-subsidies and tax-based loans the postal “service” receives, America! It’s part of the “fabric” of Americana!

And, like the vault of American liberties that has been plundered to prop it up for centuries, the USPS sees its balance sheet continually tilting towards insolvency. For example, last year, Tomi Kilgore, of MarketWatch reported:

The U.S. Postal Service reported Thursday a fiscal 2019 net loss that more than doubled $8.81 billion, from $3.91 billion a year ago.

And yet pop media mouth-breathers continue to laud the failed government-created mail monopoly.

For those who do care about liberty, one of the curious footnotes to the whole sordid USPS story is that the U.S. Constitution does provide for the creation of a postal service, but not the only postal service. In Article One, Section Eight, one finds Clause Seven:

To establish Post Offices and post Roads.

As the great libertarian and abolitionist Lysander Spooner showed Americans in the Nineteenth Century, the U.S. Post Office of his era was much like the USPS today – monopolistic, inefficient, and expensive. Spooner, who was based in Massachusetts started a private mail-carrying company, and, as Judge Andrew Napolitano wrote for the Washington Times in August:

In the 1840s, a gifted philosopher-businessman, Lysander Spooner, founded the American Letter Mail Co. It delivered mail between Washington, D.C., and Boston for significantly less than what the Post Office charged. When the federal government challenged its right to compete with the Post Office, the courts held that even though the Constitution established the Post Office, there was no prohibition in the law on competing with it.

But that didn’t stop the U.S. government from attacking Spooner…

When more folks began using Spooner’s mail service than the U.S. mail — his stamps cost less and his guaranteed on-time deliveries were reliable — the Post Office sought refuge in legislation. So, Congress enacted laws prohibiting competition in first-class mail by charging less than the Post Office. This monopolistic legislation put Spooner out of business and returned the Post Office to its lethargic ways.

A friend of mine named his son Lysander, in honor of Mr. Spooner and his many achievements for freedom, so perhaps this current frustration over the USPS can be seen as having one blessing in that it lets more people know about the man who tried to fight for more freedom in many fields, not just the mail.

Sadly, many collectivist forces were arrayed against Spooner back then, and many are arrayed against freedom-backers today.

And they shouldn’t count on the USPS to protect their freedom – or their ballots. That’s pure fantasy.

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