Vote By Mail?

Here's an idea! Let more people vote by mail! It'll be convenient for the voter, and it'll help the Postal Service's bottom line. But not so fast, the Government Accountability Office says in a recent report. GAO found that voting by mail has limited potential to provide USPS with any more revenue. Election mail has low profit margins, and there's just no support for a national 'vote-by-mail' cause. GAO says even if mail voting were implemented nationwide in the presidential elections, the volume of mail would be relatively low. If the 2008 election had been conducted solely by mail, that would've been 324 million pieces of mail.That is only two-tenths of 1 percent of the Postal Service's total fiscal-year mail volume of 177 billion pieces.