Until recent years, I was the yaysayer when it came to the efficiency of the United States Postal Service, which I found could sometimes deliver mail on the following afternoon that I had posted the previous morning, at least within Southern California.
That kind of timeliness was all I could ask for, barring the Post Office’s scope and swiftness of our great-grandparents’ time, when residential and business mail, as we are sometimes reminded when reading dusty novels from the 1920s, was picked up and delivered twice a day.
I say yay no more. It’s a miracle when anything at all gets delivered by the public courier service. UPS and FedEx are the swifties today. The rickety mail truck that Mr. Butler drives in our neighborhood is decades older than the sometimes all-electric vans the private guys drive. With no one writing letters, the P.O. doesn’t have the revenue to keep up with the Joneses.
But should we therefore hobble the Postal Service further, when it comes to delivering and picking up the mass mailings of ballots and other election materials, a task at which it still excels? Please. Mr. Postman, no.
The Post Office, like every other part of the federal government, has nothing to do with actually overseeing the voting process in American elections. That is entirely a state and then local function. All the P.O. does in elections, in the former normal-world that has lasted for centuries, is send out and collect what used to be called absentee ballots. After discovering the ease of balloting by mail post-COVID, many of us cast our ballots that way.
Including President Donald Trump, who lives in Washington, D.C. and votes in Florida. By mail.
But a whistleblower U.S. Postal Service official last week alleged that his agency is cooperating with a “secretive, rushed” plan ordered by Trump to take federal control over mail voting, even though a court has ruled blocking that plan.
That project, known as the Federal Ballot Mail Portal, would create a database for information about voters that could be used to reject ballots that might be invalid.
“The official at the Postal Service, describing their work on the portal in the whistle-blower report, raised ‘grave concerns’ that the portal’s verification process could reject tens of thousands of ballots in a bulk-mailing batch if ‘even one bar code on one single ballot’ failed to properly scan,” The New York Times reports.
Then, late on Thursday, the White House asked the Supreme Court on an emergency basis to allow it to quckly begin again its quest to restrict mail voting in the months before the midterms. Trump’s lawyers asked the justices to allow a new rule that prohibits the U.S. Postal Service from delivering ballots to states that do not share voter data with the federal agency.
As the anonymous official says, “Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all.” A group called the Whistleblower Project helped him.
Trump failed in his ability to entirely game the political map in favor of his party with partisan gerrymandering beginning in Texas when other states unfortunately had to fight fire with fire by gerrymandering their own congressional districts in return.
So now he’s trying to steal the important November election by other means.
The current president is aware that here in California ballots are mailed to all voters, and that the Golden State is key to Democratic efforts to win the House. What better way to game the system than messing up a few million ballots filled out by Californians?
Trump always traffics in cynical conspiracy theories when the facts stand in his way. The high court should not indulge his imperial fantasies of taking federal control of local elections.
Larry Wilson is on the editorial board of the Southern California News Group. lwilson@scng.com