It’s telling that after President Trump was widely rebuked for suggesting a delay of the election, he wasn’t remotely chastened. Instead, he floated another scenario that could help him accomplish the same goal of avoiding a free and fair election:
He suggested that only the votes that can be tallied on Election Day should count.
This may seem like Trumpian bluster. But it’s much more alarming in light of an important new exposé in The Post that reports on big backlogs in mail delivery due to “cost-cutting” by the new head of the U.S. Postal Service — who, by spectacular coincidence, just happens to be a top Trump fundraiser.
And here’s an additional reason for alarm that needs more attention: The impact of those delays could be dramatically exacerbated by state laws that invalidate ballots that are mailed before Election Day but arrive after Election Day.
Guess which key presidential swing states have such provisions invalidating ballots that arrive after Election Day?
All of them do, with the exception of North Carolina.
“In states where ballots won’t count if they are received after Election Day, the impact could be devastating," Vanita Gupta, the CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, told me, adding that this could “result in potentially hundreds of thousands of ballots getting rejected.”
“The delays are going to be unpredictable with the cuts being made on the postal service,” Gupta continued. “That impact could turn a swing state completely.”
The Post exposé reports that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is implementing changes that have critics charging that mail delays may be “the result of a political effort to undermine absentee voting.”
These changes, The Post reports, include “prohibiting overtime pay, shutting down sorting machines early and requiring letter carriers to leave mail behind when necessary to avoid extra trips or late delivery on routes.” The result:
The new policies have resulted in at least a two-day delay in scattered parts of the country, even for express mail, according to multiple postal workers and union leaders. Letter carriers are manually sorting more mail, adding to the delivery time. Bins of mail ready for delivery are sitting in post offices because of scheduling and route changes. And without the ability to work overtime, workers say the logjam is worsening without an end in sight.
A spokesperson for the USPS is vowing that the changes are temporary and are not intended to delay the transmission of mailed ballots. But delays could nonetheless end up having a massive disenfranchising effect whatever the USPS’s motives, due to the precise confluence of factors coming together right now.
What’s more, USPS officials can plead innocence all they want, but Trump himself is banking on these delays to save his reelection hopes. Trump is basically telling us so himself.
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It’s all there. Trump is looking to declare himself winner on Election Day, no matter how many mail ballots remain uncounted. He will say they are fraudulent. And if they tip the result against him, he will say that outcome is rigged, something he has already said publicly is inevitable.
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This sheds more light on an important piece by David Wasserman predicting a disaster brewing around absentee ballots. Democrats will use vote-by-mail in far higher numbers than Republicans — due to Trump’s nonstop attacks on it — yet absentee ballots get rejected at disproportionate rates, due to procedural complexities.
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“This is particularly unreasonable during a pandemic,” Weiser said. “We’re already experiencing substantial delays in the mail that will make it exceedingly difficult for many to meet those states’ deadlines, through no fault of their own.”
There is recourse here: Top Democratic lawyer Marc Elias tells me Democrats are litigating against these laws in every swing state, with an eye toward getting ballots counted that are postmarked before but arrive after Election Day. The absurdity of that deadline amid a pandemic and postal cutbacks might boost their legal case.
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