Chicago Sun-Times

Lightfoot accuses Trump of starving Postal Service to drive down mail-in votes

- BY FRAN SPIELMAN , CITY HALL REPORTER fspielman@suntimes.com | @fspielman

Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Monday accused President Donald Trump of “mounting a fullout assault on every pillar of democracy,” by starving the U.S. Postal Service to drive down mail-in votes and making people afraid to vote by mail.

“This is real, folks. It’s not an exaggerati­on. It’s not a conspiracy theory,” the mayor said during a virtual roundtable on election integrity that helped kick off the Democratic National Convention.

“Vote by mail is the lane we need to run in” to avoid a “repeat of what we saw in primary after primary, where people literally risked their health just to cast a vote,” Lightfoot said.

“Because of the failure of this administra­tion to keep Americans safe from COVID-19, we are wisely encouragin­g people to vote by mail . ... That’s why we cannot allow this administra­tion to undermine the Postal Service in the way that it’s clearly trying to drive the Postal Service to its knees. Making mail service unreliable. Putting postal workers at risk by changing hours and stretching into the night. And failing to give the post office the resources it needs to fulfill its basic mission,” Lightfoot said.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has threatened to summon the House back to Washington to undo the Postal Service cuts she believes are driven by Trump’s disdain for mail-in voting and his efforts to cast doubts about the integrity of voting by mail.

During Monday’s panel discussion, Lightfoot urged her fellow Democrats to take several steps to “learn the lessons of history.” They include:

† Using “pressure points at the local level” to oppose postal cuts and support postal workers.

† Convince people their mailed-in votes will be counted.

† Keep polling places open and line up election judges and polls watchers to staff them.

† And get every vote counted as quickly as possible.

“If it’s days later and we still don’t know, that’s chaos that plays into the hands of Trump,” she said.

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