State election officials could soon face a stark choice: hand over voter lists to the Trump administration or risk losing Postal Service delivery for mail-in ballots.

That dilemma stems from newly proposed USPS rules that seek to comply with an executive order President Donald Trump signed this spring to crack down on mail-in voting. If courts let the order stand, it would give the federal government an unprecedented role in elections — and could put even more voter data in the hands of Trump officials searching for supposed election fraud.

  • halcyoncmdr@piefed.socialEnglish
    12·
    7 days ago

    Although they are still stuck with the contract Trump 1 saddled them with for awful and expensive delivery vehicles.

    The replacement procurement process was started in January 2015, before Trump. And the contract itself was signed by Biden in 2021.

    Do you have anything to back up the NGDV being awful? Because from everything I can find that’s not the case. They’re much safer (airbags, anti-lock brakes, and crumple zones), and have Air Conditioning. The commentary I can find from actual USPS workers seems pretty positive. Most of the complaints are more from armchair redditors about the design, which is obviously secondary to the utility for this type of use case. Or they are complaints about the 10/90 BEV/ICE procurement split decided by the Trump admin, citing cost… even though the price difference was only about $3 Billion. Not actually complaints about the NGDV itself being a bad replacement for the LLV.

    The NGDV uses modern components, has modern safety features (the old LLV basically had none), and it’s available with both an ICE and BEV powertrain, and the ICE option can be swapped out later to the BEV, it’s not stuck being a gas powered vehicle forever.

    The old Grumman LLV has needed a replacement for decades. Anecdotally, I had two spontaneously catch fire in front on our house several years ago, about a month or so apart from failed components, likely due to age. Maintaining them cost a fortune because of that.

    Mail delivery is a near perfect use case for a BEV. Nearly identical routes every day, less than 70 miles total, with known time and distances. And long times of non-use overnight to charge the batteries, no fast charge needed.

    • turtlesareneat@piefed.caEnglish
      3·
      7 days ago

      I thought they were going to deploy like 80% of the fleet as BEV but Trump decided it should be more like 80% ICE. Conversions later, who and when and how much? Vs just getting the right thing from the beginning? Trump’s hatred of renewables fucked up the process just like so many others.

      • halcyoncmdr@piefed.socialEnglish
        1·
        5 days ago

        The Wikipedia synopsis is pretty accurate for what happened:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oshkosh_NGDV#Changes_to_battery-electric_drivetrain_proportion

        Shortly after the contract was awarded to Oshkosh in February 2021, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy appeared before the United States House of Representatives, where he testified only 10% of the planned NGDVs would be battery electric vehicles (BEVs). In response to an enquiry from Representative Jackie Speier asking why the new fleet was not 90% BEV instead of 10% BEV, DeJoy stated that 90% BEV target would require “3 or 4 extra billion [dollars]” to implement. In fact, an order of 75,000 BEV trucks was estimated to cost an extra $2.3 billion compared to a 10% BEV fleet.

        The Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for NGDV procurement, published in January 2022, concluded the preferred alternative was “to purchase and deploy up to 90 percent ICE [internal combustion engine] NGDV with at least 10 percent BEV NGDV.”  The EIS evaluated four alternative scenarios:

        • 10% ICE NGDV and 90% BEV NGDV
        • 100% BEV NGDV
        • 100% right-hand drive [RHD] commercial off-the-shelf [COTS] ICE vehicles, such as the Mercedes Metris currently in use
        • 100% left-hand drive [LHD] COTS BEVs, using the Ford E-Transit as an exemplar

        According to the EIS, it would cost $11.6 billion to implement a 100% BEV NGDV fleet, $3.3 billion more than the split 10% BEV / 90% ICE NGDV fleet alternative.[