Let us clear the air

By now you have probably heard that the Postal Service is "sabotaging" mail-in voting. In fact, you have probably heard little else. Democrats, activists, and reporters have charged the administration with tampering with the mail to disenfranchise millions of voters. What's more, they claimed, they have the goods to prove it. But even by the largely baseless standards of political debate in 2020, this assertion is ridiculous.

The supposedly ironclad proof is not a secret plan for mail voting obstruction or a confession caught on a hot mic. It is a series of public letters that the Postal Service sent to states to warn them that some have deadlines for "requesting and casting mail ballots that are incongruous with the Postal Service delivery standards."

Strangely, despite the blow-up over the weekend, the Post Office had issued a similar notice in the spring. For weeks, the Postal Service has been advising voters to request absentee ballots at least two weeks before Election Day, to make sure voters' ballots have ample time to move through the system. Mail delivery isn't done by teleportation, after all.

But that sensible precaution isn't reflected in many state laws. In Pennsylvania, for instance, voters can request an absentee ballot just one week before an election. In Michigan, the cutoff is a mere four days. As the letters point out, tight deadlines like these set everyone, voters and officials alike, up to fail.

Election offices inundated with record numbers of last minute requests can be overloaded, leading to slowdowns and delays with no margin for error. New York, which also has a oneweek ballot request deadline, mailed more than 34,000 ballots one day before the June primary. Whose fault is that? Certainly not the Postal Service.

The reality is, these deadlines are logistically unrealistic, and always have been. In even the best of times, four days is likely not enough time to process a request, prepare a ballot, mail it to a voter, and then expect it to be mailed back. That problem must be addressed. Instead of stoking fear and outrage over imagined conspiracies, our leaders and media could be investigating genuine solutions. They don't have to look far.

The easiest and most responsible option is to push up the deadline for requesting an absentee ballot so that it has ample time to be processed and complete a round trip through the mail. In recent trial testimony, the head of the New York Board of Elections indicated the board had "repeatedly" recommended that New York push its deadline to 14 days, the same timeline recommended by the Postal Service.

Barring that, states should be open and honest with the American people. If they are going to request an absentee ballot, they need to do it early; and if they haven't mailed it back by October 27, they have other options: drop it off at an official ballot collection location, vote early, or in person on Election Day.

The Postal Service is an ossified giant with a litany of issues that ought to be tackled by serious institutional reform. But a nefarious plot to intentionally sabotage mail ballots is not one of its problems. Fact checkers at USA Today concluded that claims of deliberate or politically motivated sabotage were false; any reasonable person looking at the evidence would concur.

As usual, the debate over mailin voting is about generating heat, rather than light. We ought to be focused on Anthony Fauci's declaration last week that there is "no reason" Americans would not be able to vote in person if they wear masks and practice social distancing. Yet some liberal leaders told us the opposite, and that only a universal mail voting election can solve the problem.

The results speak for themselves: New York's six- week delay in election results, the vote fraud scandal in New Jersey, the waste of public funds spent mailing unsolicited ballots to old registrations and deceased voters - more than 200,000 in Clark County, Nevada, alone - and the incredibly high percentages of rejected ballots. The left's mail voting "solution" has left a trail of disenfranchised and dissatisfied citizens in its wake.

Liberal activists and politicians ought to answer for that chaos, and explain why they continue to fight in Congress and in courts to impose these risky, and now definitively unnecessary, policies on voters. No wonder they prefer to invent conspiracies.