I love buying local.

By that, I mean I love buying from one of the large multinational online retailers that have a large warehouse in Reno, then only waiting a few hours for the U.S. Postal Service to ship my purchase from its warehouse to my front door. Given how much traffic and road construction all of those warehouses generate, it’s wonderful for these large businesses, with the invaluable assistance of the Postal Service, to give back to the community by giving us all free same-day delivery, even if it’s likely somewhat by accident.

Thanks to a favorable tax and business climate that makes it cheaper for many businesses to store their goods in Nevada and ship them to California than it would be to store their goods closer to the majority of their customers (California, after all, has more than 10 times the population of Nevada), Reno and Las Vegas are becoming increasingly important logistics hubs for the region.

So, naturally, the Postal Service recently announced it plans on shipping everything currently mailed in Reno to Sacramento first.

The Postal Service didn’t say this directly, of course. Instead, it announced a plan to invest up to $8 million into modernizing the Reno Processing and Distribution Center. This investment would convert Reno’s main facility into a Local Processing Center and move most mail processing operations from Reno to Sacramento.

Don’t worry. According to the text of the Postal Service’s plan, there will be no career employee layoffs. There might, however, be a “net decrease of 11 craft and 1 management positions” once the conversion is complete. A subsequent paragraph then spends 115 words explaining the commitment the Postal Service has made to “ensuring there is a clear path for our pre career [sic] employees” while stressing that “there is a higher turnover rate with these employees, providing [the Postal Service] the opportunity to capture savings by rightsizing our workforce when making long overdue operational changes and avoiding any career layoffs.”

Put less bureaucratically, the Postal Service plans on transferring a dozen full-time employees to Sacramento and laying off an undetermined number of temporary and seasonal postal workers.

If it sounds like the Postal Service is doing everything within its power to claim it’s doing one thing — investing millions into modernizing Reno’s primary postal facility and keeping jobs in Reno — while simultaneously burying the fact that it actually plans to downsize operations in one of the fastest growing logistical centers in the country, you’re more perceptive than the Postal Service gives you credit for.

You are not, however, uniquely perceptive. Washoe County’s recently appointed interim registrar, Cari-Ann Burgess, had this to say when asked for a comment on the Postal Service’s recent proposal:

“I am opposed to moving our mail processing to the Sacramento area. This movement will impact thousands of Washoe County voters and disenfranchise those who cannot participate at in-person voting locations. The repercussions this could have on voters’ confidence in our election system is not an acceptable prospect to me or my office. We need people to vote; I want people to have faith in their vote.”

Packages, after all, aren’t the only thing residents in Northern Nevada place into the mail. Greater than half of those who voted in the 2022 election in Washoe County elected to vote by mail. That’s over 100,000 mailed ballots from Washoe County alone, not including neighboring counties, all of which must be received within four days of the election to be legally counted.

Did I mention that it snows in the mountains between Reno and Sacramento? Did I mention that the Donner Party, the infamous namesake of the eponymous pass between the two cities, got stuck in said snow in late October? Did I mention that Election Day is statutorily set for the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, which can occur over a week after the date the Donner Party was snowed in?

Did I mention that state transportation officials are already struggling to keep roads in the region reliably plowed due to major staff shortages?

Even if Donner Pass remains clear, shipping over 100,000 ballots from Nevada to California before they’re stamped with a California postmark and shipped back to Northern Nevada’s county election officials is an obvious recipe for conspiratorial nonsense. Certain notorious notables in the area already do everything they can to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt regarding the state’s mail ballot process. Letting Nevada’s favorite bogeyman receive our ballots before they’re counted would demolish any trust or faith in the integrity of those ballots. 

Especially if a semitruck full of ballots jackknifed on a snowy interstate and visibly tossed them into the wind.

Why does the Postal Service want to ship Northern Nevada’s ballots to Sacramento? It’s tempting to argue that Louis DeJoy, a donor to former President Donald Trump who  attempted to enact a series of cost-cutting measures that nearly derailed the 2020 election after he was appointed to lead the Postal Service, is pushing these changes intentionally to disrupt Nevada’s mail balloting system.

Doing so, however, would be irresponsibly conspiratorial and, frankly, there’s no proof. The Postal Service employs hundreds of thousands federal employees, many of whom are unionized and have no incentive to cooperate with a politically meddlesome postmaster general. If naked malice were at play, the hardest part would be queuing every Postal Service whistleblower into an orderly line so each of their allegations could be quoted by the nearest journalist of record.

DeJoy’s intent is actually quite plain. Quoting from Delivering for America, he believes the Postal Service is “in crisis” and its “business and operating models are unsustainable and out of step with the changing needs of the nation.” He cites “steep annual financial losses in the billions of dollars, unmet service performance goals, and less market relevancy as consumer behaviors have changed.”

In short, he’s trying to run the Postal Service as a business and wants to cut costs.

Being a profitable business, however, has rarely been the Postal Service’s mission. According to Founding-Era Socialism: The Original Meaning of the Constitution’s Postal Clause, an academic source cited by the Constitution Annotated project maintained by the Library of Congress, the original Postal Service was inherited from the British royal post system. When the royal post system was established during the 16th century — in other words, during Shakespeare’s day — it existed solely for the benefit of the royal government and consequently was not a profit-making enterprise. 

Decades later, however, the British government realized it would be beneficial to open the network to private letters and parcels. No, not beneficial to the British people — beneficial to the British government. Monopolizing the system of parcel correspondence granted the British government a regular source of intelligence (in surreptitiously opened mail) and a new source of revenue (in postage). Opening the royal post system to private use and prohibiting all competitors allowed the British government to maximize the advantages it received from what otherwise served as an interoffice delivery service.

By the American Revolution, which succeeded the establishment of the royal post system by two centuries, the primary purpose of the postal system was still understood by contemporaries to be maximizing what we would now call state capacity, or the ability of the government to conduct its business with its subjects, not profit. 

Even so, Adam Smith — arguably the father of economics and an otherwise staunch opponent to government-run businesses  — acknowledged in The Wealth of Nations that post offices are “perhaps the only mercantile project which has been successfully managed by, I believe, every sort of government. The capital to be advanced is not very considerable. There is no mystery in the business. The returns are not only certain, but immediate.”

Consequently, when drafting the Articles of Confederation, America’s founders decided to keep the Colonial remains of the royal post system in the hands of the newly created federal government. Doing so provided the Revolutionary government an important source of intelligence and revenue, just as it provided the royal government in Britain. Due to the Postal Service’s invaluable assistance during the Revolution in providing intelligence and revenue — in that order of importance — there was little debate about continuing to assign Congress the powers to manage the Postal Service in the Constitution.

It wasn’t until the 19th century that the nation’s only constitutionally and statutorily protected government-owned monopoly visibly shifted its mission from one of explicitly serving the needs of the federal government, and those in control of it, to one of public service. A mission of public service, however, is seldom directly profitable. According to the Postal Service’s history, the Postal Service has consequently often struggled to cover the costs of its operations while attempting to serve every American throughout its history.

No matter. The government needed, and still needs, a way to send jury notices and tax bills to those it governs. This is properly the government’s job for the same reason the military is the government’s job — the government cannot delegate away responsibilities directly assigned to it. If the government fails to send important paperwork to your house, it needs to be the government’s fault that said failure happened and the government’s direct responsibility to address it. Otherwise, the government can simply dodge accountability by blaming a never-ending carousel of private subcontractors without ever addressing any of the structural issues it created for them or itself.

Nowadays, the government needs a reliable, safe and secure way to conduct its elections. Though elections are constitutionally delegated to state governments, the consequences for each state’s elections are experienced federally in the election of legislators and the selection of the electoral votes that ultimately select each president. To ensure the reliability, safety and security of each state election, it is imperative that ballots produced in each state remain solely within the state in which they originate until they’re counted. It is also imperative for the Postal Service to retain enough capacity in each state to efficiently process all ballots produced, distributed and returned within each state.

For Reno to retain that capacity, the Postal Service must compromise its profitability — an accounting accident it only ever reliably enjoyed when it had a total monopoly on parcel shipments in the 18th century — in favor of its mission of providing service to the public. 

Yes, doing so will cost tax money. So does holding elections and governing more generally.

If you agree, the Postal Service has a survey for the public to provide comments to. If you’d prefer Nevada’s ballots to remain in Nevada, please consider filling it out.

David Colborne ran for public office twice. He is now an IT manager, the father of two sons, and a weekly opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Mastodon @[email protected], on Bluesky @davidcolborne.bsky.social, on Threads @davidcolbornenv or email him at [email protected].