Missing mailboxes hit hot button, but USPS has averaged removing 3,000-plus a year since 2010.
But USPS cuts 3,000-plus a year for past decade
A U.S. Postal worker rolled through downtown Columbus, Ohio, in late May, stopping to hoist iconic blue mailboxes onto a flatbed truck. Protests after George Floyd’s death under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer had taken a destructive turn the night before.
In front of the offices of the Columbus Dispatch, a reporter asked the worker why he was taking the boxes. Because of the riots, he told her. In all, more than 30 mailboxes disappeared from the city’s streets that day.
They didn’t return until Aug. 21, the same day Postmaster General Louis DeJoy testified to a Senate committee about postal cuts.
In the meantime, across the United States, missing mailboxes had become a political hot button.
On average, from 2010 through 2019, the Postal Service reports it removed 3,258 drop boxes per year.
The Postal Service did not respond to USA TODAY’s request for records of boxes removed this year. Comparing a list of mail collection boxes the Postal Service released in September 2019 to those listed on the agency’s website this month showed a reduction of more than 4,200.
Reporters across the USA TODAY Network checked on 271 of those boxes in 20 states and confirmed that 186 were not there. The others had not been removed.
Even if this year’s removals track with historical averages, 2020 has been anything but a normal year. Some voting rights experts question why the Postal Service would remove any mailbox during a pandemic when more voters than ever are expected to cast ballots by mail.
“Why now? Why not wait until after the election?” said Bernard Fraga, associate professor of political science at Emory University.
“It’s a lifeline for a lot of people,” said Brett Max Kaufman, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union.
Seniors, those with disabilities and limited transportation, often rely on collection boxes in their neighborhood for outgoing mail.
They will grapple with the choice of voting in-person and risking illness or trying to navigate voting by mail, said Capri Cafaro, a former Democratic member of the Ohio Senate who teaches politics at American University.
“The removing of mailboxes and sorting machines has a disproportionate impact on underserved communities, where the post office is really relied upon,” she said.
States are expanding voting access in different ways, including offering ballot drop boxes, and in some cases extending the deadline for returning ballots.
Fears about voter suppression centered on mailboxes in mid-August when at least one viral tweet purported to show a pile of them at a dump. The photo was debunked, but it was shared more than 80,000 times and coincided with real news reports of boxes being removed.
Public concerns reached the highest levels of government. The House approved legislation Aug. 22 to allocate $25 billion to the Postal Service and ban operational cuts until after the election – a move the agency said would happen.