• The near-term insolvency of the Postal Service was created by a Congressional action in the 2006 Postal Reform legislation which required the Postal Service to prefund all its retiree benefit obligations over the first 10 years after the legislation passed.  Why?  Since the Postal Service is off-budget, and it was getting its overpayments into the federal pension system returned to it, the artificially fast prepayment was a budget-balancing gimmick.  The Congress should have made the Postal Service prefund the retiree benefit obligations the way any private sector company would do so: over the expected 30-40 year life of the obligations.
• The longer-term problems of the Postal Service are driven by rapid and deep declines in mail volumes.  The Postal Service needs to reduce its cost structure much faster.  There are many good ideas that have been proposed for years, but that have not been adopted, such as the relocation of retail postal functions into convenience stores and supermarkets.  However, the Congress and the White House have to step aside and let the Postal Service take some of these steps.
• The Postal Service wants to reduce mail deliveries from 6 to 5 days.  I am not convinced that this step can be taken without damaging the growth potential of certain categories of mail.  What the Postal Service needs to consider is whether it needs to do 6-day-a-week to every address.  Sweden has variable frequency delivery, with 5 days in urban areas, three days in remote mainland rural areas, and two days to remote islands.  The Postal Services needs to begin delineating differences between profitable urban delivery routes and unprofitable rural delivery routes.
• On the flip side, the Congress and the Postal Service need to consider whether pricing for mail originating or being delivered to remote areas should be priced the same as mail traveling a few city blocks.  Uniform pricing has always been seen as a core feature of a communication system on which Americans have depended for political discourse, educational content management, charitable purposes, and other important social causes.  The broad penetration of the Internet makes many of the needs for uniform pricing less compelling.  However, to the degree that we continue uniform pricing, it can be for certain categories of mail, with others starting to move toward distance and cost based pricing.

There are some opportunities for cost reduction or revenue enhancement Leonard did not discuss.  Also, his comments about European and other international postal services reflect a lack of understanding of the degree to which governments supported unprofitable non-core services undertaken by their national postal services.  DuetschePost, for example, entered many non-core businesses and lost money in most of them, including disastrous acquisitions of DHL and Airborne.  The U.S. government cannot afford to bail out the Postal Service as it dabbles in non-core businesses, loses money, and exits those businesses.

There are still many revenue opportunities in the core business which, although no one of them will address the insolvency issue, collectively can help the Postal Service dig out of the deep hole in which it finds itself:

• The Postal Service has failed to educate its huge small business base on the e-Commerce opportunities available from marketing over a longer distance provides it.  Businesses often miss opportunities to market their services directly to consumers far removed from their local catchment area, simply because they do not know how to market their products and services remotely.
• The Postal Services has also failed to help businesses that normally do not use the mail start to grow their business through highly targeted direct mail marketing.  At Pitney Bowes, we showcased a New York Japanese restaurant in an annual report several years ago that used direct mail, instead of delivery of flyers by its delivery personnel, to reach out to occasional customers and to potential new customers to grow its business.  The restaurant not only grew its own business, but also became a direct marketer for other restaurants.
• The Postal Service and the mailing industry should be advocating a movement from face-to-face retail for both government services and voting to the delivery of services by mail.  Passports, licenses, and vital records should arrive by mail, so that labor-intensive and highly inconvenient retail operations can be shut down or scaled back.
• The Postal Service should promote voting by mail, rather than face-to-face voting.  Oregon does all its voting by mail, and Washington, California, and several other states do a majority of voting by mail.  In these states, ballots are sent in the mail and returned by the voters.  The Northeastern and Southeastern states are still laggards in allowing voting by mail, but this can add several hundred million dollars a year to mail revenues.
• Finally, the biggest need for product manufacturers is to build direct relationships with the people who use their products.  The retailer typically “owns” the customer and knows how the customer is.  However, there is nothing to stop manufacturers from building a parallel relationship with those who buy or use their products.  Kraft did these extremely effectively through a combination of Internet and mail-based systems years ago.

Crises can be disasters, or they can give rise to innovation that strengthens an organization.  For the sake of the American people, it is my fondest wish that the U.S. Postal Service not let this crisis go to waste, and that Congressional and White House decision makers give the Postal Service the support it needs to innovate.

Periodically, my lifelong decision to be an independent voter, rather than a registered Democrat or Republican gets reinforced. My independence stems from a deep distrust of a concentration of power or financial reward anywhere in our governmental, business, or non-profit sectors.

Recently, I have seen evidence of what happens when there is the following lethal combination of circumstances we have today:

• highly-concentrated government or business power,
• inattentiveness of the majority of the population,
• exceptionally high rewards from the exercise of concentrated power, and
• more power concentrated in ideologically-driven people.

The vast majority of Americans are unhappy and insecure with respect to the political and business environment in which they find themselves. 

Fiscal Irresponsibility at all Levels of Government

Without most of us noticing it, state and local governments, which are required to balance their budgets every year, have engaged in a massive transfer of wealth from the vast majority of their citizens to a relatively small, but exceptionally militant and well-organized group of state and local government employees.  I am not angry at the demands made by these employees in their collective bargaining negotiations, but am disappointed that elected officials have not only supported and caved in to those demands, but have also hidden the true costs of these actions from voters.

In Connecticut, for example, the present value of retirement benefits for state employees, including elected members of the executive and legislative branches of state government, is $40 billion as of the end of the 2007 fiscal year, and it is probably higher today.  For roughly 80,000 full-time employees, that averages $500,000 per employee at the time of retirement.  Although this money is paid over time, it is part of the long-term indebtedness of the state that crowds out the ability of the state to invest in roads, bridges, public transit, education, public health, environmental sustainability, public safety, and rebuilding of our cities, among the much worthier uses to which the money could have been put.

Connecticut is not unique in this regard.  Virtually every state has some astronomical retirement benefit obligation, as amply demonstrated by a report of the U.S. Government Accounting Office, http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08317.pdf

How did this happen?  Our elected officials are generally well-intentioned individuals with a desire to serve the broad public interest.  However, when confronted with well-organized public employees’ unions who want increases in pay and benefits, it has been far easier to concede on long-term benefits than on short-term pay increases, since the long-term benefits are not required to be reflected in annual state government  income statements.  I do not blame the unions for demanding these benefits, or even the elected officials for agreeing to them, but I believe that the public has been relatively disengaged for too long in monitoring issues like this.

On Monday, July 20, both Houses of the Connecticut General Assembly voted on straight party lines to override Governor Rell’s veto of a well-intended, but flawed, health care bill called the SustiNet bill.  Although the bill had many great features and was supported by many great leaders, one of its fatal flaws was the creation of a health policy board specifically designed to exclude many critical stakeholders, including large employers, insurance companies, hospital leaders, and pharmaceutical companies, all of whom should have been part of the board. 

In effect, the General Assembly, through amendments to the original legislation, set out to create a highly unrepresentative policy board on one of the state’s most critical competitiveness issues.  Until after this bill passed both houses of the General Assembly the first time, few business leaders were even aware of its existence, much less its damaging terms and conditions.  I wrote an Op-Ed piece in the July 19, 2009, Hartford Courant expressing my opposition to this legislation as enacted, specifically, in part because of whom it excluded from the health policy board, and called some of our elected representatives.  While I obviously did not succeed, I did my best to make sure that elected legislators knew how I felt.

Too many business leaders believe that they can escape fiscal crises and problems in their headquarters states by leaving those states, but we are increasingly coming to realize that there is no place to which to escape.  The federal government will end up bailing out state and local governments, as it has done with significant chunks of the stimulus legislation, and all of us will pick up the tab.

The answer is not to replace the incumbents, whether they be Democrats or Republicans with other incumbents, nor is it to have term limits (which I support for other reasons.)  The answer is a more continuously engaged and active citizenry, particularly in the business community.  Too many major CEOs and other senior executives think of themselves as world citizens who have little connection to the communities in which their companies have major operations.  Too often they delegate management of government affairs to specialized legal and government affairs professionals.

If we are to constrain the absolute power of government officials and the special interests to which they cater, we need the check and balance of continuous engagement by a much larger part of our citizenry.  As travel writer Rick Steves stated in his book Travel as a Political Act,

“Whether you’re a mom, a schoolteacher, a celebrity, a realtor, or a travel writer, it’s wrong to stop paying attention and let others (generally with a vested interest in the situation) make political decisions for us.  Our founding fathers didn’t envision career politicians and professional talking heads doing our political thinking for us.”

Although I do not plan to go as far as folk singer Arlo Guthrie and become a member of either party, I agree with his comment in the interview entitled “Just Folk” in the Sunday, July 26, 2009, New York Times:

“I became a registered Republican about five or six years ago because, to have a successful democracy, you have to have at least two parties, and one of them was failing miserably…We needed a loyal opposition.”

To put it simply, if we are to avoid the corrupting effects of concentrated power, we must take back that power from those who have it.  I do not believe those with power today are bad people.  In fact, I have much in common with their goals, and believe them to be decent people who want to do the right thing.  However, without checks and balances, everyone, including me, is highly likely to make significant and bad decisions.  We cannot let that happen.

Several things struck me as I reflected on the conference:

• After the Florida debacle in 2000, and the issues associated with the exceptionally tight Washington state gubernatorial race in 2004 that resulted in the election of Governor Christine Gregoire by about 100 votes out of 3 million cast, election officials and the federal government are more focused than ever on getting the election process right. They want accuracy, security, reliability, and, above all, they want every vote to count in the manner intended by the voter.

• Given the substantial increase in participation in voting as a result of the hotly-contested Democratic and Republican presidential primaries, they have a high degree of interest in securing long-term increases in voter participation. We will have a much healthier democracy if everyone participates not only in voting, but in other ways that result in greater civic engagement.

• There is more interest than ever in continuously upgrading election technology and process. Historically, elections officials would acquire technology and keep it for decades, with little or no improvement. I even heard of communities that had voting machines with levers that were still in operation in the last election that had been in use since 1898. Today, no election official who seriously wants to serve his or her citizens can afford to fall behind that badly. Federal funding through the Help America Vote Act, and supplementary state funding, as well as non-profit voter registration initiatives, and for-profit innovation are all designed to improve voter registration and voting processes continuously. This Law Librarian Blog post cites the first study on voting technology innovations prompted by the Help America Vote Act. Studies such as these should help speed up the adoption and usage of improved voting technology.

• Despite the excitement in the presidential campaign and the obviously greater participation we would expect to see in a 2008 presidential election year, elections officials still want to figure out how to increase voter participation in state and local elections, particularly when there is a referendum, as opposed to candidates, on the ballot. Even though young people have been energized to participate in the federal part of elections, they have yet to evidence a significant interest in elections that actually affect their lives in more profound ways, the state and local elections. This Rock the Vote blog reviews some myths and facts about the impact of the youth vote.

• Related to the participation issue with respect to state and local elections is the “undervote” issue, that is, the tendency of many voters who complete their ballot relative to federal election candidates, but fail to vote on state and local issues. We need to understand why undervoting occurs and to figure out a way to address it.

• Beyond participation, the next frontier is how to upgrade people’s knowledge about candidates and issues relative to more obscure elections. Many tools exist to educate voters relative to presidential and congressional candidates. State and local elections are still lagging behind, although the use of cable TV channels like C-Span and the analogous channels for state and local government have the potential to bring voters up to speed on issues closer to home. We also need to develop web and paper-based tools to help voters. This Freedom to Tinker blog post reviews how the Libertarian Party of Arizona has gone so far as to execute online voting for its primary election.

• I am particularly impressed with the League of Women Voters site Vote411.org as an informational and educational tool. It answers many basic questions for voters, such as polling place identification, who is on the ballot, and where candidates stand on issues. It is a wonderful tool, and more people should use it.

As a citizen, I came away from the meetings feeling very good about the dedication of our election officials, but also appreciating the complexity of their jobs and the thanklessness with which they perform those jobs. Election processes are like light-switches. No one marvels at the technology that enables them to work when they are functioning normally, but a huge amount of criticism gets directed at them when they fail to work. We need to appreciate what we have in America and continue to make it better.

I have always believed that government officials and businesses get too enamored of the latest and greatest technology, without recognizing and trying to retain the benefits of older technologies. Pitney Bowes has strongly believed that the most secure system of all is voting by mail, which supplements traditional paper-based ballots with state-of-the-art address management software and ballot tracking and tracing systems.

The biggest problem identified in the article was the quirkiness and unpredictability of computer-based systems, which fail in unexpected ways on election days, because of the large number of people using them. The kinds of misuse possible when tens or hundreds of millions of people use a system are not all predictable, and, therefore, not preventable. This Freedom to Tinker blog post clarifies some points made in the article in reference to this topic.

The other problem not identified in the article, but equally contributory to the challenges of getting an accurate vote count is the fact that this electronic technology is designed to be used within a 12-15 hour window on one day. Errors are hard to detect, and breakdowns are extremely difficult to correct in that short a time window.

A voting-by-mail system, by its nature, stretches the voting process over a several-week period. It is simple to use, tolerant of errors, and it will fail, if it does, in predictable ways that can be prevented through sophisticated technological design. Moreover, because it is a system that is used over a several-week period, errors can be detected and corrected in virtually all cases without a disastrous impact in a short time window. It has the great advantage of producing a secure paper trail. Finally, it eliminates the challenges and headaches of provisional ballets.

The Pitney Bowes Relia-Vote™ system is elegantly simple. Every ballot is sent to a single registered voter. The ballot can be tracked all the way to the letter carrier’s bag, using the Postal Service’s CONFIRM technology, which scans mail every time it goes through a sorter. The voter is supplied with a pre-bar-coded return envelope, and the ballot is mailed back at the voter’s choice.

To prevent fraud, signatures on the envelope can be compared by the incoming mail sortation system with the signature already on file, which assists the election inspectors that have to deal with signature verification issues. Since one ballot is sent per voter and no more than one can be received back, there is no risk of a single individual voting more than one time.

Opponents of voting by mail sometimes make the argument that individuals can be bribed or coerced into voting a certain way when they are filling out the ballot, whereas in-person voting has tight controls that prevent coercion at the polling place. The best solution for the coercive vote is to give the voter the ability to rescind the vote mailed in at any time up to an election day deadline. By allowing voters to rescind their choices and vote in person on or up to election day, election officials can also address another concern of early voting by mail, the argument that voters may not absorb all of the relevant information from the candidates or from proponents of referenda late in the campaign before they cast their vote.

Proponents of in-person voting can retain that option, while allowing no-excuses voting by mail, but I believe that if security and confidence in the election results is the highest-priority goal, secure voting by mail is the best solution.

The Election Law blog cites a useful report issued by Common Cause, which reviews the benefits of vote by mail elections, as well as proposed solutions for potential problems cited by opponents.

There may be other reasons to retain in-person voting, especially if it is allowed to be done over a several-week period, as is the case in Texas, but “no-excuses” voting by mail should always be an option.