WASHINGTON—Republican Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, foisted on the U.S. Postal Service by Donald Trump just months before the presidential election four years ago, is screwing up election ballot deliveries—again.
As a matter of fact, his performance so far is so bad that state and local elections officials, from blue, purple, and red states, say DeJoy has left them in the dark about whether he can ensure election mail will get top priority.
And Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., is so upset by slow service in Georgia—at one point on-time deliveries dropped to 36 percent in much of the state—that he wants to take the decision of who should be Postmaster General out of the hands of the agency’s board and put it back in the hands of the U.S. Senate, just as it was when the PMG was a cabinet officer. And with a maximum of two five-year terms, too.
“The execution debacle by the U.S. Postal Service in Georgia has been a failure of leadership and a failure of management and it has reflected the incompetent leadership and the incompetent management of the Postmaster General himself,” Ossoff told a Zoom press conference on September 21.
His complaints, relaying constituents’’ concerns, to postal management in general and DeJoy in particular, starting in the spring, have been ignored. The elections officials received a pro forma response, via Reuters wire service, from a DeJoy spokesman who declined to be identified.
“That is why we have to ensure highly qualified candidates become Postmaster General of the United States,” by making them presidential appointees subject to Senate confirmation, Ossoff said.
“This is about whether seniors are receiving their medication in the mail. This is about whether citizens are receiving vital notices from the court—notices to appear, notices of eviction. This is about whether small businesses can function. High-quality Postal Service can’t be a luxury. It is a necessity.”
Ossoff’s press conference, now on YouTube, drew immediate support, in texts, for firing DeJoy. Responses included:
“I live in Maine & my mail has been delayed ever since DeJoy dismantled & scrapped sorting machines. Example is 10 days to get my mail after mailed in my town!!! 10-15 days to get mail from Boston. He has got to go!!!” texted D. Bridges.
“I’ve been a mail carrier for 36 years and have never seen such injustice committed with the mail,” texted Amalia Irizarry. “Management hides the mail in order to reach their HR goal…They don’t care about customer service.
“We should have the president of the United States remove him from office as well as appoint the postmaster general,” texted Vincent Masci aka “Spanky.” “Trump said he appointed DeJoy, but Biden can’t get rid of him? He’s interfering with our election and he should be in jail, not just fired.”
Meanwhile, the election officials, in letters to postal brass and Congress, say the sole detail DeJoy has revealed warned people who are mailing in their ballots to do so at least a week before their state’s mail-in deadline, which precedes Election Day. That raises even more questions about the reliability of the USPS, now run by former XPO package company plutocrat DeJoy.
Especially since the local officials report, that some ballots, which voters sent in advance of election days during primaries, got to local election boards ten days or more after the Election Day deadlines. They got tossed out and the voters were disenfranchised.
Not the only ones in the dark
The local officials aren’t the only ones kept in the dark about DeJoy’s attitude towards looming delays. He apparently hasn’t told the Letter Carriers, either—or the joint union-management board set up four years ago to monitor the whole voting-by-mail process and outcomes.
“Despite our stellar record of delivering votes by mail, some who are misinformed have cast doubt on the Postal Service’s ability to successfully fulfill our role in vote-by-mail elections,” says new Letter Carriers President Brian Renfroe in the latest issue of the Postal Record. “These opinions are misguided and, frankly, wrong.” The complaints he referred to came from politicians, including Trump.
“The facts are that we successfully handled election mail for many years in some states and have the capacity to easily handle it for every single voter in the country. We know our network is unmatched, and the statistics do not lie.” Renfroe reported more than 99 percent of mailed-in ballots in both 2020 and 2022 were delivered to local election boards within a week of the election days involved.
“As we head into another election season that could produce record vote-by-mail ballots, we will again surpass expectations and deliver Americans’ votes. Letter Carriers should be very proud of the work we do,” Renfroe declared.
The issue is important because, according to both the Postal Service and the Letter Carriers, voters in record numbers turned to voting by mail in both the 2020 presidential balloting and the 2022 off-year election, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. Almost half, 46 percent, of votes were mailed in in 2020.
It’s also important because of DeJoy’s moves in the run-up to the 2020 balloting. North Carolinian DeJoy—a GOP big giver whose first campaign contribution check almost half a century ago went to ultra-racist Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C.—ordered the disassembly of postal large-envelope sorting machines which could handle election mail flats.
And he removed hundreds of ubiquitous USPS blue mailboxes from the nation’s central cities, especially ones with majorities of voters of color. The removals were national but were especially noticeable in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, the largest cities in swing-state Pennsylvania.
All this prompted Democratic complaints, including one from a Michigan lawmaker who had been a Postal Worker for decades, that DeJoy was deliberately trying to skew the election in favor of then-GOP President Donald Trump. Her district, in that swing state, included most of Detroit.
The Motor City and Baltimore had the slowest delivery in the U.S., the agency’s inspector general reported. Both cities are heavily majority people of color.
This time, it’s not the Democrats who are complaining. It’s more than 30 state and local elections officials, headed by the secretaries of state of Minnesota, a Democrat, and Mississippi, a Republican.
“Over the course of the last year, election officials across the country raised serious questions about processing facility operations, lost or delayed election mail, and front-line training deficiencies impacting USPS’s ability to deliver election mail in a timely and accurate manner,” their letter begins.
Have not seen improvement
“Despite repeated engagement with USPS Election and Political Mail headquarters staff and state/ regional Managers of Customer Relations, we have not seen improvement or concerted efforts to remediate our concerns. In fact, many of the issues raised by election officials are echoed in the recent findings of the USPS Office of Inspector General Audit, Election Mail Readiness for the 2024 General Election.”
The state and local elections officials singled out “inconsistent training for USPS staff,” about how to handle and put top priority on election mail.
“Ballots [are] being deliberately held to remediate erroneous billing issues, significantly delayed, or otherwise improperly processed. In some cases, this has resulted in misdelivery of ballots such that voters are disenfranchised.
“The frequency and widespread distribution of training-related issues” for the postal service’s more than 600,000 workers—roughly evenly split between the two largest unions, the Letter Carriers and the Postal Workers, with a small fraction of Rural Letter Carriers/Laborers—“makes it clear these are not one-off mistakes or a problem with specific facilities.”
And DeJoy’s “Delivering for America” plan has longer delivery times, thanks to postal sorting center closures and consolidations. That makes a bad problem even worse for mailed-in ballots.
“In nearly every state, local election officials are receiving timely postmarked ballots well after Election Day and well outside the three to five business days USPS claims as the first-class delivery standard. Election officials in multiple states report receiving anywhere from dozens to hundreds of ballots 10 or more days after postmark. There is no amount of proactive communication election officials can do to account for USPS’s inability to meet their own service delivery timelines.”
USPS officials, who declined to be named, told Reuters the Postal Service is “committed to the timely and secure delivery of the nation’s election mail.” When local and state election officials “brought any issues to our attention, we promptly addressed those concerns, and we will continue to do so.”
Ballots aren’t the only problem DeJoy’s delivery plans present for voters, the local election officials warn. There are too many instances where pre-addressed USPS mail to voters “is being marked as undeliverable at higher than usual rates, even in cases where a voter is known not to have moved.”
Informational mailers about election days and locations, voter address confirmation cards, and ballots “have all been returned as undeliverable,” when the voter/voters were still at addresses USPS has.
The result is voters getting bounced from the rolls, having to re-register, or, not knowing they’ve been thrown off, showing up at polling places and being turned away, as local elections officials obey the mandates of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, commonly called the “Motor Voter” law.
“The increase in undeliverable mail raises two significant issues,” the local election officials wrote:
- “(1) Potential disenfranchisement of voters whose ballots are not delivered to them or to their election office, and
- (2) putting eligible voters on the path to having their voter registration record canceled.”
All of which means voters must be on the alert, and re-check their registrations. With mail balloting already open in select states, and fewer than two months before Election Day, time is of the essence. That’s what the state and local elections officials are saying, too.
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
CONTRIBUTOR
Comments