The United States Postal Service and mail thieves are both getting better at their trade.  The USPS now saves time by delivering mail to one master mailbox serving an entire neighborhood, apartment building, or other centralized location.  The problem is that this supposed increase in mail efficiency also makes it easier to steal dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of mail-in ballots.

Thieves have broken into mailboxes for years.  Their favorite targets were checks or someone foolish enough to mail cash.  The advent of electronic banking with its associated credit and debit cards made marauding through mailboxes more profitable.  Thieves steal new bank cards and quickly run up charges, buying easily resalable items.  They then list the fraudulently bought item on sites such as eBay or Craig’s List.  The stolen cards quickly become cash.

But the mailbox burglars found a better way than prying into mailboxes one at a time.  They now steal the Postal Service’s master keys to hundreds of mailboxes.  Rather than breaking into mailboxes one at a time, they can now access the back of a group of mailboxes, turn the stolen key in the lock, and collect the cash.  Stolen keys sell for as much as $7,000 on the black market. 

Recently, thieves found even more gold in the illegally entered mailboxes.  Mail-in ballots are easily stolen and sold.  A few hundred purloined ballots can easily tip the tide in a local election, and hundreds of thieves can change a state’s results.  How lucrative is this?  The target list is virtually endless.  In California, Colorado, and other states, voters do not even have to request a mail-in ballot.  The state sends them to every registered voter!    

This is not just a potential problem.  The Postal Service admits that more than 8,000 of the so-called “arrow” master keys are missing.  That total does not include the stolen keys.  Those 8,000 missing keys are exactly that: 8,000 express-lane illegal entryways to your mail that our Postal Service confesses it cannot find!

(I think it would be justified to add a sentence here complaining about increasing postal rates, but what’s the use?)

According to Scripps News, the problem is so severe that the USPS will replace 28,000 arrow master keys with more secure electronic locks.

This problem could be eliminated by returning to the system of citizens caring enough to show up on Election Day and putting an X next to the name of their chosen candidate.  Notice that the last sentence refers to each voter marking a paper ballot.  We already know how insecure some gee-whiz electronic voting machines are!

Image: Ben Schumin via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.