Among all the chaos and destruction wrought by Donald Trump and his Republican minions like Mitch McConnell, eroding the faith of the electorate in both the U.S. Postal Service and our elections system is one of the most disturbing. The sudden lack of faith in the system is playing out across the country, as voters flood elections officials with calls. They don't trust their ballots to the U.S. Postal Service and are scrambling to respond with ballot drop boxes and locations where they can conduct safe, physically distanced in-person voting on Nov. 3. That widespread panic has intensified with the news that the USPS had informed 46 states that their elections are in jeopardy because of potential mail delays.
“We’re facing a crisis here, a major crisis,” Steuart Pittman, the top official in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, told The Washington Post. “If this election is not carried out in a way that people accept the result, we’ll have a national crisis.” Gary Scott, the general registrar in Fairfax County, Virginia, said, “We have gotten a high volume of calls. […] It has kept a considerable portion of the office staff busy on the phone.” The Post checked in with election officials in Michigan, Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, North Carolina, and Colorado, and heard the same story. Likewise with The New York Times: “The office has been flooded with calls for the past few days,” said Katie Hobbs, secretary of state of Arizona. “The concern I have is that, like any campaign of misinformation, it attempts to undermine voters’ confidence in our process.”
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It all comes down to one thing: the destruction of the Postal Service. The images of dismantled sorting machines, piles and piles of packages sitting unsorted and undelivered, graveyards of blue mail boxes, stories about dead chicks, and viral rumors of internal political sabotage have spread throughout the country. “I ripped up my mail-in ballot application,” said Colleen Connolly-Ahern, a communications professor at Pennsylvania State University in State College. “I will be going to my little polling place, putting on my mask and standing in line.”
Lots of states are looking at expanding ballot drop box sites, including Arizona, Iowa, Michigan, Kansas, Pennsylvania, Washington, California, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Idaho, Georgia, South Carolina, and more. The Trump campaign is fighting that effort in court in Pennsylvania. The campaign is also intervening in Ohio, where the League of Women Voters and the Ohio Democratic Party have sued Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose to make access to absentee ballots easier.
“Some voters have been upset, and we’re just trying to counter the messaging they’re hearing with the facts,” said Kim Wyman, Washington's Republican secretary of state, which is all vote-by-mail and has an extensive network of drop boxes. “That was actually part of our plan when we started ramping up for 2020. We figured it would be foreign interference that would be ramping up disinformation; shows you what we knew.” The interference is coming from inside the house, as close to an admission of Trump's destruction as you're going to get from a Republican.
The good news is that the USPS sabotage news broke in August, not October, giving Democrats time to get the word out to voters and give them time to make a voting plan. The bad news is that Trump has succeeded in sowing chaos and distrust, part of a larger plan to be able to contest a loss in November. That means that voters have to overcome their fear and distrust to deliver a resounding loss to Trump and Republicans on Nov. 3, and it has to happen in the middle of a pandemic.
