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I do not work in an office that handles BBM delivery (bulk business mailings- hehe gotcha!), but I can say that this is quite possibly a legit mistake.
Let me explain something to those of you who do not work in and have never toured a large postal facility. Everything does get done, but to an outsider, it's often done in an incomprehensible fashion.
For example:
A letter that comes into our building from you comes in at our loading dock, gets put into a hamper with several hundred other letters, large "flat" envelopes, small (hand sized) parcels, and such. These items are dumped into a machine that first separates them out first by thickness, then by dimensions. What's left after this process are ordinary letters, which are sorted in an Automated Facer/Canceler/Sorter (AFCS). This electronically reads the script writing on the face of the envelope, as well as detecting the presence of a stamp, and the direction the letter is faced.
All letters that can be read are sprayed with a barcode right there, which contains the address information only. If a barcode already exists- such as with business reply mail, bill payments, and so forth- the letter is sorted at high speed into a letter tray and sent to a Delivery BarCode Sorter (DBCS). More on that in a moment.
If the script on the letter cannot be read, the letter is sent to the Input SubSystem machine (ISS). This takes a photo image of the letter face and is presorted by city. The image of the envelope is sent to a Remote Encoding Center (REC site- I worked at one of those as well), where the address data is manually keyed by a Data Conversion Operator (DCO). That data is sent back to the originating plant, where it is sprayed as a barcode onto the envelope on yet another machine called an Output SubSystem (OSS).
Eventually, each letter with a barcode will find its way to a DBCS, mentioned above. There, the letter is sorted at a speed of (ideally) around 40,000 pieces per hour. That is not a typo. From there, the letter may be subject to further sortation on a DBCS with a different sortplan (there are 172 stackers on most of the DBCS machines in our plant, and multiple sortplans for different purposes), sometimes several times, before making its way to a carrier.
When bulk mailing do come into our plant- usually business adverts, bulk bill mailings (AmeriTech, Verizon, Consumer's Energy, etc), and so on- They are on large pallets (aka 'skids') hefted in by forklift and unceremoniously plopped down in front of us. If these are mistagged, or the driver makes an error, they can end up in a totally incorrect portion of the plant. This is where a vulnerability may lie WRT absentee ballots being mailed to a known Democratic or Republican stronghold. If the forklift operator is politically aware and highly unethical, and is willing to break the law and put his job and his freedom on the line, he very well could park that skid in an inappropriate location in the plant.
This still would not prevent those absentee ballots from being delivered. These things are not small and are quite heavy when they are full; they do not go unnoticed in a well-run facility. In fact, if the ballot delivery were delayed somehow at the delivery point, it could as easily be blamed upon poor postal management, poorly trained 'casual' level employees (and we are using them quite a bit at our facility; those of us who have been there a while do our best to train them on the fly), worker apathy, or something else related to the plant; it isn't necessarily intentional voter fraud.
But then, that in no way makes that an impossible explanation; my purpose here is to detail what happens in a postal plant. There are a multitude of places where a simple, honest error can be made; there are just as many places for someone with malicious intent to foul things up. That is the nature of this massive beast we call the Postal Service; it would be the same were the entire operations of the plant fully automated with no actual worker involvement.
Many of the trucks that come into our plant carry the slogan "B&B" on the trailer. That may be another place to investigate regarding this absentee ballot issue; I do not know for certain whether they are used regionally or nationally.
Hope I've been of some help.
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