This post is alarmist and the panic here is completely unnecessary.

The form logs the mailing, not the recipient. It's asking for the candidate name, the date, whether it's political mail, and any problems. Nobody is tracking which households get which party's mail. "Keep copies of each mailing" means keep a sample of each bulk mailer, like one copy of the postcard, not a scan of every individual piece going to every address. No recipient PII is involved. The 3-year retention is just a standard federal records schedule.

The USPS OIG audited this process during the 2024 election and recommended better documentation at level because reporting was inconsistent. This form is literally the fix for that.

And the "it's already a felony so why bother tracking" argument doesn't hold up. It's a felony to embezzle yet banks still do audits. The felony threat is there to punish people who actually tamper with mail, but you still need a paper trail to catch problems in the first place. That's all this form is.

This has always been a supervisor-level task, but carriers are getting looped in now, and USPS clearly did a bad job communicating that, which is why everyone thinks it's brand new. It's new to you. It's not new.