Neither snow nor rain nor Trump?
President Trump has been challenging the integrity of mailin ballots for months despite having frequently used them to cast his own votes — much as countless Americans have done largely without incident since the Civil War. Now it’s becoming clear how he hopes to close the chasm between this rhetoric and the reality of a system that works just fine: by undermining it himself.
Recently installed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major Trump donor and investor in the Postal Service’s privatesector rivals, has cracked down on overtime pay and curtailed sorting hours, among other measures ostensibly meant to cut costs. The changes have already led to reported delivery delays of two days or more around the country.
This deliberate slowdown comes as states and voters are preparing to rely on the mail to an unprecedented extent for a presidential election that is less than three months away. The coronavirus is spreading among Americans faster than ever, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has noted that the mail is therefore the safest way to vote.
Nevada is expected to join California and half a dozen other states in mailing every registered voter a ballot under legislation passed Sunday. Twentyone other states have taken steps to ease voting by mail, from sending every voter an absentee ballot application to loosening or eliminating requirements for requesting one. Nearly 7 million ballots were cast by mail in California’s March election, a record for a primary.
The Postal Service’s ability to deliver the additional ballots in a timely manner is therefore crucial. Thirtythree states, including most of the closely divided presidential battlegrounds, require absentee ballots to be returned by election day to be counted. Even the voterfriendly states requiring only that ballots be postmarked by election day set delivery deadlines on some subsequent date.
California’s ballot delivery deadline was extended to 17 days after election day under legislation signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in June, but other states are less forgiving. Under California’s prior deadline of three days after election day, which is more typical of other states, more than 100,000 ballots — about 1.5% of the total — were rejected, mainly for arriving late.
The political implications of a hobbled Postal Service haven’t gone unnoticed. In his eulogy for congressman and civil rights hero John Lewis, former President Barack Obama noted that “those in power” are “undermining the Postal Service in the runup to an election that is going to be dependent on mailedin ballots so people don’t get sick.” The head of the postal workers’ union has said new procedures threaten to slow delivery of ballots along with other mail. And four Democratic senators signed a letter to the postmaster last week saying his lack of transparency about the recent changes “increases concerns that service compromises will grow in advance of the election and peak mail volumes in November.”
In typically unsubtle fashion, Trump has already telegraphed how he might use such conditions to his advantage in the fall. Even though California and other states now take days or weeks to tally results, which facilitates voting by mail and ensures that more votes count, the president suggested last week that a winner should be declared on election day. After Nevada became the latest state to authorize distribution of absentee ballots to all voters, Trump wrote on Twitter that the “post office could never handle the traffic of mailin votes” — or so he hopes — and accused the state of “using COVID to steal” the election. That is precisely the point of his own relentless attack on the safest and surest available means of voting.