A Republican-dominated U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors is having more success than it could have imagined when it set out months ago to undermine the institution. The pandemic and the need for so much of this year's vote to have to be conducted by mail has presented them the perfect opportunity to accelerate their efforts, and while they're at it, help Donald Trump. They've targeted their efforts well, if evilly, on communities of color and on critical swing states.
Even before Postmaster General Louis DeJoy was installed in May and initiated his sabotage, complaints about slowed and missing delivery had increased, "especially in communities with more Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color (BIPOC), according to new research by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS)." Through Freedom of Information ACT requests, the UCS reviewed USPS data on customer complaints and found a sharp increase in mid-March that lasted through July. It found that, when controlling for population, "people in zip codes where more than 45 percent of the population are BIPOC submitted 50 percent more mail delay complaints than other zip codes."
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We've already seen how that's effected elections; in Wisconsin's primary in April, at least 9,000 requested absentee ballots either were never sent or got lost on the way to voters. Thousands of the ballots voters received and sent back to elections offices were either delivered too late to be counted or just not delivered at all. Then came DeJoy's summer of sabotage, compounding the problems for Wisconsin and other swing states.
While DeJoy has supposedly called a stop to some of the measures that caused slowdowns in mail delivery—a strict delivery schedule that had trucks leaving distribution centers empty and postal carriers having to leave mail behind as well as restrictions on overtime—the delays are still a problem. The Washington Post reviewed agency data, and found that in "17 postal districts comprising 10 battleground states and 151 electoral votes, first-class mail service is down 7.8 percentage points from January benchmarks and nearly 2 percentage points below the national average." That means that right now in those districts, 16 out of 100 pieces of mail aren't reaching their destinations in the 1-3 day delivery window the USPS has set. In January, it was fewer than 10 in 100 pieces.
This is particularly concerning for Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia as key states that will not count ballots that arrive after November 3, even if they are postmarked before. In North Carolina and Pennsylvania, they'll have to be received at elections offices on or by November 6 and have an earlier postmark to be counted. Detroit has been one of the cities where mail has been particularly erratic, with just 70.9% first-class being delivered on time through the first part of October, compared to 92.2% at the beginning of 2020. With nearly 85% Black and Latinx population, Detroit is a prime city for Republican officials to target, especially since it's in swingy Michigan.
The Post talked to mail carriers in Detroit, who said "they receive messages daily telling them to prioritize packages—which often have guaranteed delivery windows—over other items, including election mail." They also report that they've taken it on themselves to sort their mail on their own routes, making sure that ballots and voting information gets delivered. There's also this: "In facilities that serve Detroit’s mostly White suburbs, staffing has remained steady, the workers said, and residents can expect delivery daily. If a piece of mail is late, they said, it likely will arrive the next day." Unless residents in non-white neighborhoods have a prioritized package, the workers said, they'll likely only get mail two or three times a week. "I walked around a little bit; it was a mess in there," a letter carriers said of one Detroit post office. "There was mail everywhere. And not mail everywhere in the sense that 'Carriers come in the morning and this is my route for the day, I've got to [sort] this up and get out of here.' This was mail everywhere because no one is there to carry that mail."
On top of all that, the DeJoy has taken all its police officers (yes, there are postal police) off the job. The force accompanies letter carriers in unsafe routes and also patrols to keep mail vehicles and blue collection boxes protected, to guard against theft. This means that nefarious political parties can more easily tamper with mail to steal ballots. The union that represents the officers filed suit last month, alleging "the U.S. mail and postal personnel are receiving less protection" and are "in increased danger" because of DeJoy's order. The Department of Justice is defending the USPS, and has asked the federal judge to dismiss the suit.
The USPS and Justice contend that officers should only be protecting USPS "property," the actual post office buildings, not the mail and carriers. The union and officers see it as one more in the list of actions DeJoy has taken to sabotage the election. Jim Bjork, business agent for the Postal Police Officers Association and a former letter carrier and police officer said if that wasn't what was intended "then why not wait until after the election to neuter the postal police?"
If this isn't a partisan effort by DeJoy, who got this job right after a large donation to Trump's RNC, and who is a long-time major Republican donor, then it sure is all very coincidental that his efforts to increase "efficiency" of the Postal Service are working against Democrats in this election.
