Opinion

Editorial: Mail service critical to 2020 elections, Trump needs to end irresponsible attacks

Thursday, Aug. 6, 2020 -- As state and local election boards have been working to expand voting opportunities and shore up absentee voting by mail to accommodate our life-saving need to be socially distant, President Donald Trump's postal service is making critical voting by mail and absentee voting less reliable. That is the REAL voter fraud here - not the phony scenarios the president has conjured up.

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CBC Editorial: Thursday, Aug. 6, 2020; Editorial #8571
The following is the opinion of Capitol Broadcasting Company.
As the United States was just becoming a nation Ben Franklin was its first postmaster. It was a mission -- in those days before railroads, telegraphs, telephones, interstate highways, radios, television and the worldwide web – to create a communication network to bind the 13 colonies into a country. No one had more experience – he’d been Postmaster of Philadelphia and was the King of England’s Joint Postmaster General of the colonies.
Two-hundred-forty-five years later the Postal Service Board of Governors named North Carolina businessman Louis DeJoy, whose main qualification for the post has been the money he’s raised for President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, to be the latest postmaster. In his short tenure DeJoy has taken action making mail delivery slower, less sure and inefficient.

He ordered a halt to paying postal workers the overtime so mail carriers could complete their daily rounds. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, postal package volume has nearly doubled – exacerbating the opportunities for Trump to find ways to exploit his feud with Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s top executive and owner of The Washington Post. It has caused significant delays in deliveries of letters and packages.

In the midst of his actions that effectively are dismantling the postal service, that service has never been more critical to the nation and especially with the approach of the national election.

As state and local election boards have been working to expand voting opportunities and shore up absentee voting by mail to accommodate our life-saving need to be socially distant, Trump’s postal service is making critical voting by mail and absentee voting less reliable. That is the REAL voter fraud here – not the phony scenarios the president has conjured up.

Wendy Fields of the Democracy Initiative, a coalition of voting and civil rights organizations, said the president was “deliberately orchestrating suppression and using the post office as a tool to do it.”
This is no political biased pot-shot. It is a very real worry that will have an impact on Democratic, Republican and unaffiliated voters alike. Through Tuesday, Aug. 4, county boards of elections in North Carolina report receiving 131,140 requests for absentee mail-in ballots. Four years ago on the same date, there were 20,890 requests, according to Michael Bitzer, chair of the Political Science Department at Catawba College, who tracks North Carolina voting behavior. More Republicans have already requested absentee mail-in ballots at this point than ALL voters had requested four years ago on the same date. In 2016 a total of 233,000 votes were cast via absentee mail-in ballot.

Timely delivery of absentee mail-in ballots is critical. Properly completed ballots must be returned to the county board of elections no later than 5 p.m. on Election Day (Nov. 3), according to state law. Ballots received after that will only be counted if they arrive by 5 p.m. on the third day (Nov. 6) after the election and are postmarked on or before Election Day.

Assuring the election is conducted fairly and every proper ballot is counted is not a simple task. North Carolina election officials work hard at it and, for the greatest part, succeed. When outside influences seek to undercut election integrity, as some Republican operatives sought to do in the 9th Congressional District 2018 campaign, they are exposed.

Earlier this week, as a variety of election interests sought to broaden the ability of people to vote, federal Judge William Osteen Jr. offered important admonishments to state election officials and legislators. While rejecting several proposals from voting rights advocates, officials still should "carefully consider" those ideas along with several recommendations from state Elections Director Karen Brinson Bell. Legislators includes only a few of them in recently passed election legislation.
"Any failure by the state government to carefully plan, maintain flexibility and alternatives to potential problems, and consider new and unique ways of addressing an election conducted during a global pandemic could easily lead to the same difficulties experienced by Georgia and other states holding elections during this pandemic, resulting in voters unable to exercise their fundamental right to vote," Osteen said in his opinion.

That admonition from Osteen, appointed to the court by President George W. Bush, also applies to the president and the U.S. Postal Service.

Rather than sabotaging mail delivery at a time when it is most critical to our democracy and looking for ways to discredit an election, President Trump – and our representatives in the Senate and U.S. House -- should be looking at ways to reinforce the Postal Service and provide the resources to assure mail is handled and delivered in in an expeditious manner.

Voting matters. During the pandemic more, not less, must be done to assure all who can cast ballots are able to do so.

NOTE: This editorial has been updated.  Louis DeJoy was appointed Postmaster General by the Postal Service Board of Governors. He was not appointed by President Donald Trump.

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