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The unofficial slogan of the Post Office for generations has been: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
But while the weather can’t stop the mail from getting through, President Trump thinks he can. He’s trailing in the polls, including most swing states, and assumes that attacking the legitimacy of mail-in voting will somehow help his re-election bid.
He thinks voting by mail is a recipe for fraud. Really? Numerous studies say he’s wrong. Here’s just one.
Americans have been voting by mail for most of our country’s history. U.S. service members, for example, cast ballots during the Civil War. My own dad, rest in peace, voted while serving in Korea during the Korean War. Had Trump not been a draft dodger and served in Vietnam, he could have voted as well.
In more recent times, the total number of voters who voted early, absentee or by mail more than doubled from 24.9 million in 2004 to 57.2 million in 2016, reports the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency. That’s about 40% of all ballots cast in an election that was won by Trump. Fifty-seven million ballots, yet no significant fraud.
The lack of evidence hasn’t kept Trump from trying. He launched a “Voter Integrity Commission” after he took office and had two of his biggest supporters, including Vice President Mike Pence, lead it. Cut to the chase: It disbanded quietly after finding “no evidence to support claims of widespread voter fraud,” according to an Associated Press analysis of documents released by the Trump administration.
Trump’s base
The number of Americans voting by mail this year will be bigger because of the pandemic. But Trump has only recently figured out that this could hurt his base, which skews older as much, if not more, than Biden’s. One example: As of Aug. 12, over 600,000 more Democrats than Republicans had requested mail ballots, according to the University of Florida’s Michael McDonald. If Trump loses Florida and its 29 electoral votes, he has no path to re-election.
Yet the guy Trump appointed to postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, has throttled back the postal service by clamping down on overtime, shutting down high-speed mail-sorting machines and more, which will create election bottlenecks. The USPS acknowledges this: CBS News reports that postal officials have warned election officials in numerous states, including critical swing states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan, that mail-in ballots may not be delivered in time to be counted this year because their deadlines are too tight.
DeJoy says he wants to be transparent, yet he hasn’t responded to requests for meetings with both Republican and Democratic secretaries of state from around the country, says David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a Washington-based non-profit.
On Tuesday it was announced that DeJoy will testify Friday before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Out-of-the-box idea
What can be done? There is talk of an out-of-the-box idea: Let the private sector get involved. Companies including FedEx FDX, -0.92%, UPS UPS, -0.24%, Amazon AMZN, +2.84% and Walmart WMT, -1.26% have vast distribution networks, pickup services and secure drop-off locations. These are corporate brands with high degrees of trust and reliability.
Could they work with state and local officials, and each other, to quickly develop some way of securely delivering ballots and distributing them to state-sanctioned voting facilities?
“No, I don’t think so,” says Becker. “It would probably cause as many problems as it solves.”
He points out that the infrastructure for mail balloting is already well-established and that the solution is staring us in the face: “Just give the post office the money it needs to process ballots.”
The ironies are both rich and sad. Trump talks nostalgically about America and the way things used to be. But that America was one where our leaders (most of them, anyway) respected things such as the rule of law. Presidents didn’t try and rig an election by messing with the mail.
So here’s a message I don’t need the postal service to deliver: Screwing around with the mail, trying to prevent American citizens from exercising their right to vote is about as un-American as it gets.
