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Wednesday, June 17th, 2020

The Postal Service Is Steadily Getting Worse — Can It Handle a National Mail-In Election?

Author:     Ryan McCarthy and Maryam Jameel
Source:     ProPublica
Publication Date:     June 15, 5 a.m. EDT
 Link: The Postal Service Is Steadily Getting Worse — Can It Handle a National Mail-In Election?
Stephan:   In Article 1: Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, the powers of Congress are defined. These were the powers that the Founders thought so important that they felt it necessary to enumerate them in the country's founding document. This included, "The Congress shall have Power: To establish Post Offices and post Roads. For more than two centuries that has been a fundamental of American democracy. But not under the Trumplicans. What they want is to privatize the post office so a small group of the Republican kleptocrats can milk the post office for profit. Their other short-term strategy is cripple the post office by defunding it, as a way of impeding vote-by-mail. These people simply don't care about American democracy. The facts speak for themselves.  

Two weeks after the polls closed in this year’s Ohio primary, two U.S. Postal Service employees showed up in the office of Diane Noonan, the director of elections in Butler County. The workers carried a tray of 317 unopened ballots that had been sitting in a Postal Service warehouse since the day before the election.

The ballots would have counted if they had been delivered on time. Now, there was no way to legally count them. The next day, another ballot that had been postmarked in time to be counted arrived with no explanation. In Geauga County, officials found 26 such ballots; Lucas County saw 13. Many election administrators in Ohio had already lost patience with the Postal Service. During Ohio’s April 28 primary, mail delivery had been so slow that the secretary of state publicly warned voters and called for the Postal Service to add staff. As they counted votes, Noonan and her team checked in with the service every day until the deadline. “We said, ‘Listen this is the last day,’” she recalled. “‘If we get ballots […]

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