The Michigan primary is another giant screaming warning about the damage Donald Trump has already done to the U.S. Postal Service in a year when vote-by-mail will be essential to a safe and fair election. With just days to go before Tuesday’s primary, The Washington Post reports, some voters hadn't received their absentee ballots—including one man who said he’d requested his ballot in June. (It is now August.)
Election officials were urging people who still needed to submit absentee ballots to do so in person at election offices or in dropboxes, because they couldn’t trust the Trump-damaged Postal Service. Primaries have been a series of tests of how to vote during a pandemic, and Michigan voters responded by voting absentee by mail in large numbers, with nearly four times as many absentee ballots sent out as in 2016, and the state’s previous record for mail-in voting, set during the 2016 general election, already broken in this primary.
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Other states voting Tuesday had also seen increased requests for mail ballots.
“The post office, for many, many years, has been run in a fashion that hasn’t been great,” Trump told reporters Monday. “Great workers and everything, but they have old equipment, very old equipment, and I don’t think the post office is prepared for a thing like this. You have to ask the people at the post office, but how can the post office be expected to handle [this]?”
How can the post office be expected to handle this? Gee, I don’t know, maybe back in March Trump could have allowed Congress to put money for the Postal Service into the coronavirus economic relief package. Maybe he could have chosen a postmaster general on the basis of experience rather than on the basis of contributions to Trump and willingness to weaken the institution.
Trump is attacking the Postal Service intentionally, from blocking the same kind of coronavirus bailout that so many private businesses have gotten to installing a major Republican donor as a postmaster general tasked with slowing down the mail to his constant verbal attacks. And then he’s using his own destruction as evidence that the Postal Service can’t be trusted to deliver mail on time. Which it may not be able to—now, because of the specific policies that Louis DeJoy, Trump’s donor-postmaster general, has put in place. House Democrats have called DeJoy to testify, but not until September, which gives him more time to damage the institution he’s in charge of.
There is a real threat to access to voting here. We see it clearly in Michigan and elsewhere. And the clock is ticking on the limited time left to fix things.