With COVID-19 still booming across the country, it’s hard to believe what America will look like on Election Day on November 3. But one thing is certain: even if we have started to control the virus since then, many immunocompromised Americans, the elderly, or simply unwilling to take on the threat of contracting the virus, you will have to vote in the mail to make sure your voice is heard in our democracy.
All Americans must be deeply involved in the recent politicization and sabotage of the U.S. Postal Service through the Trump administration.
On 7 May, one of the deadliest weeks of the pandemic, Louis DeJoy was appointed the country’s new post minister. DeJoy’s top rating appears to have been to have donated more than $1.2 million to the Trump Victory Fund and led the Republican National Convention fundraising effort.
Since DeJoy took over the postal service, he has implemented a series of new debatable and deeply damaging policies that have slowed mail delivery across the country and led to the attack of postal workers, rural elected officials and election advocates. On Friday, he re-commissioned 23 postal executives in a reorganization that included the dismissal of the two senior postal officials overseeing day-to-day operations. These steering settings threaten to revert to the company and jeopardize its independence.
As the nation’s 75th postmaster general (the first was Benjamin Franklin), DeJoy inherited one of America’s most storied institutions, one established in the Constitution itself. During much of its history, the Postal Service has played a critical role in ensuring democracy’s promise.
The Civil War battlefields were the first control of the American mail voting system. Approximately 150,000 Union soldiers voted by mail and helped prompt President Abraham Lincoln for overwhelming re-election in 1864. Since then, American troops have relied primarily on mail-in voting to participate in our democracy, and many sent their ballots from war zones.
In recent decades, as states began to see the myriad benefits of mail-in voting, more and more Americans have used this voting approach. That includes many senior Trump management officials and President Donald Trump himself.
In the last presidential election, 33.6 million more people, about 1 in four voters, voted by mail. If the COVID-era primaries are an indication, that number will soar in November.
In the June Kentucky primary, for example, mailed votes accounted for 85% of all votes. In Michigan, more than three times as many electorates asked for mail votes for the same time in 2016.
And all this is done without the case of electoral fraud, contrary to the president’s fulminations.
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Mail voting has never been more essential to our democracy than this pandemic. And the postal service has never been more politicized than it is today. It’s a poisonous, harmful mixture.
Trump has made his disdain for vote by mail well known. In April, he called the U.S. Postal Service a “joke” and stood in the way of $10 billion in aid that Congress approved as part of an earlier pandemic relief bill.
Trump has also made it clear that he is ready to use the USPS for his own political ends. For example, he demanded that shipping fees on Amazon increase, whose CEO, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post, which criticizes Trump. And hypocritically, when it serves political purposes, it will favor mail-in voting as it has recently for Florida voters.
This is a democratic emergency. The result of the November presidential election will be, at most, by vote by mail. And with about two-thirds of states saying they may not settle for any mailing ballots that arrive after Election Day, the way voters are treated once the electorate has returned their ballots is one of the most important political decisions of the 2020 election. Restrictive procedures in many states are challenged in court through organizations that accompany mine, the Civil Rights Lawyers Committee under the Law.
Given his background, we simply cannot accept as true that the Trump administration allows for a free and fair election by mail. Congress will now have to act to shield the mechanisms and independence of the postal service.
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In addition to allocating $3.6 billion in investment to states to help them organize elections by mail, as I recently suggested in a testimony before the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, Congress will have to hold oversight hearings without delay to find out why DeJoy Post Minister, who has invested up to $75 million in COMPETITORS and subcontractors of the USPS Array has already dismissed or displaced officials in critical positions and imposed new policies that seem to undermine the agency’s main mission.
Postal service has been a common thread connecting American communities since the nation’s fragile beginnings. We count there during wars, herbal errors and, yes, pandemics. This November election may be the ultimate critical time for postal service. We will have to make sure that, like snow, rain, heat and darkness at dusk, politics will not prevent you from completing your designated rounds.
Kristen Clarke is President and Executive Director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under the Law. Follow her on Twitter: @KristenClarkeJD