Missouri, Kansas Republicans quiet as Postal Service dismantled to derail voting by mail
It’s been two weeks since the U.S. Postal Service informed Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft’s office that Missouri voters are going to have to post mail-in ballots at least a full week before Election Day to make sure they arrive in time to be counted.
Yet we only heard about this after reporters contacted his office on Friday to see if Ashcroft had by any chance gotten the same letter that Pennsylvania officials had received. The director of the Kansas City Election Board said he had heard nothing about it, either.
When Pennsylvania officials received that message, they responded by petitioning their state Supreme Court to extend the voting deadline. As they should have, to avoid disenfranchising any voters.
Ashcroft has not only done nothing of the sort, but said in a statement, “This is a non-issue in Missouri. You can vote safely in person on Election Day, and we have already proven that three times in 2020 during the COVID pandemic.”
There is no comparison between turnout in local and primary elections and a presidential year general election. Missouri is currently a COVID-19 red zone, and neither Ashcroft nor anyone else can know how safe in-person voting will be in November.
Ashcroft has made Missouri much less reliant on the U.S. Postal Service, he says, by extending the period during which voters can request a mail-in ballot, and allowing voters to do that by email. And he has often told the story of a St. Louis woman who mailed her ballot for a municipal election six days before Election Day. Her ballot took 14 days to arrive.
Only, an anecdote and an official warning from the U.S. Postal Service are two different things. And how again is all of this a non-issue in Missouri?
We’ll never know when or even if Ashcroft would have filled us in about the July 31 letter from Thomas J. Marshall, general counsel and executive vice president for the USPS, which said that the Postal Service “cannot adjust its delivery standards to accommodate for the requirements of state election law.” Under current Missouri law, ballots that haven’t been received by Election Day, which is November 3, just won’t count. Officials in 46 states and D.C. received such letters.
According to Ashcroft’s own anecdote, even mailing in a ballot a week before Election Day might not be enough, so why not follow Pennsylvania’s example and make sure those ballots count?
All of this would be fishy enough on its own, but it came just a day after President Donald Trump said in front of God, Maria Bartiromo and her Fox Business Network audience that he doesn’t support either election aid for states or emergency funding for the Postal Service to make sure all ballots are counted. Why? Because, he says, Democratic mail-in ballots are suspect.
“The reason the post office needs that much money,” he told White House reporters on Thursday, “is they have all of these millions of ballots coming in from nowhere and nobody knows from where and where they’re going.”
That’s false. Trump, who has himself requested a mail-in ballot in Florida, keeps claiming without any evidence that mail-in voting will lead to massive voter fraud. Since he claimed massive fraud even when he won, also without any evidence, we’ll be hearing fraud charges regardless.
The safeguards in place for the mail-in voting he opposes are the same as for the mail-in absentee voting he supports: Florida, he says “has got a great Republican governor, and it had a great Republican governor. Ron DeSantis, Rick Scott, two great governors. They’ve been able to get the absentee ballots done extremely professionally. Florida is different from other states.” Not really, though Florida has no-excuse absentee voting, which Republicans in Missouri and elsewhere have opposed.
To make voting by mail even harder, Louis DeJoy, the longtime GOP fundraiser and top Trump donor the president appointed to serve as postmaster general, has ordered the removal of mailboxes and mail sorting machines all over the country. That’s also happened in Missouri and Kansas, for vague reasons that supposedly involve making the U.S. Postal Service more efficient, though what’s happened so far is just the opposite. Four such machines have been removed this summer from post offices in Kansas City.
It’s illegal for anyone connected to the Postal Service to willfully delay the mail, and DeJoy has only acknowledged that “there have been unintended consequences related to these efforts” — efforts to cut costs, he means — “that have impacted overall service levels.” What a coincidence.
Also coincidentally, the Republican National Committee is spending millions to fight the expansion of mail-in voting, even in the middle of a pandemic, and is preparing to challenge every possible mail-in Democratic ballot. Conservative lobbies are on the case, too. Charles Koch has been waging war on the USPS for decades.
As the Kansas City Democrat, U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, said, “The country is watching in slow motion the destruction of the U.S. Postal Service.”
Yet most Republicans have just kept walking as older Americans suffer needlessly because they’re not getting their prescription drugs and other necessities delivered on time. If this is an unintended consequence, DeJoy should be fired for incompetence. If he’s delaying the mail on purpose, he should be fired for breaking the law.
Democratic Kansas Rep. Sharice Davids, whose mother works for the Postal Service, has called for his ouster. Unfortunately, that’s unlikely, as long as he’s doing exactly what the president wants by effectively undermining the mail service ahead of the election.
But Davids also said this: “What we need right now is for our Republican colleagues in the House and the Senate to make sure that they’re informing the president just how important the Postal Service is, and I’ve not seen that.”
Neither have we, and even now, that’s stunning.
Last month, Vanity Fair reported that the Trump administration had been planning a strong, coordinated national response to COVID-19 until Jared Kushner’s private working group became convinced that the pandemic was going to hit blue states far harder than red ones, so never mind. But it didn’t work out that way, did it?
Slowing the mail in hopes of delaying Democratic ballots is not only just as indifferent to human life, but just as unlikely to impact only Joe Biden supporters.
On Friday, Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran’s office said he’s been trying for months to schedule a meeting with DeJoy but hasn’t been able to. DeJoy is too busy trashing mail processing machines to meet with a U.S. senator from his own party?
Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt did tell reporters he supports some additional money to help the states “do our best to be sure that the November elections are held safely and results are available.” And it’s true that, as Blunt also said, every day’s delay in reaching a COVID-19 relief bill deal will make those funds less effective, because the injection of cash is needed now.
That’s why members of the House and Senate should be in Washington working on a deal instead of at home on break until after Labor Day. On Sunday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called House members back to D.C. to vote on a bill that would protect the USPS.
Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts told reporters he had no comment on funding for the U.S. Postal Service. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley has only said that delays in the mail ahead of an election are unacceptable. So why don’t Republicans support the emergency funding that would make the unacceptable impossible?
As this sabotage becomes more undeniable, it’s looking more and more like an election in which every voter who possibly can is going to need to mask up and show up in person to cast a ballot. Then we’re going to have to be prepared for a long and contentious wait for results, even if this is not what democracy is supposed to look like.