The postal service (USPS) is claiming that it can neither deliver ballots to voters or deliver executed ballots on time to state election authorities for tabulation for the November election. No timely mail going out to voters and no timely mail from voters to boards of elections throughout the country.
The sticking point for USPS is money.
Trump does not want mail-in voting. On Thursday, August 13 Trump told Fox Business News that if the government does not give more money to USPS, there will no mail-in voting. That ends that.
Later in the day he dialed back on his earlier statement and said that he would approve legislation funding USPS for the election even though he disapproves of voting by mail.
There is no such legislation on the horizon. The Senate is away until September so it’s easy for Trump to say he would approve since he knows there will be nothing for him to approve.
Starving USPS to stop voting by mail is outrageous. It calls for a plan of civic activism to assure that voters will be counted. The Congress will be of no help because the House and the Senate are controlled by different parties and can’t agree on when to have lunch. And they’re out of town anyway.
The National Association of Secretaries of State, the officials who run elections in the various states, is on record decrying Trump’s vote-by-mail kneecapping.
Fortunately, most of the battleground states have Democratic governors. They include Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.
These governors should immediately establish an Emergency Voter Rights Coalition (with any Republican governors who wish to join).
Passing the question of whether voters receive their ballots from USPS in the first place, the Coalition must convince voters to deliver their completed ballots to approved official state locations such as courts, schools, and state colleges that will be designated by each state’s Secretary of State as an approved depository. Ballots so deposited can be delivered to the various boards of elections as received for tabulation at the appropriate time.
(There does not appear to be as much concern about USPS’s ability to deliver blank ballots to voters as there is about delivering the executed ballots.)
All states now approve delivery to the offices of the various boards of elections. Thus, there is no legal requirement that a completed ballot must be delivered to the USPS for mailing to the boards.
A method should be established with the cooperation of delivering voters to let the public know the details of delivered ballots. Perhaps this can be done through a website or with the cooperation of social media.
The website should establish a public dashboard showing how many ballots have been received and from where. Thus, if properly used and publicized, the number who voted and from where will be public.
Compared to the additional funds needed to tabulate the millions of ballots received, the Emergency Voter Rights Coalition will not cost that much.
Potential security issues with ballots delivered to state facilities other than the local boards of elections are not a problem. Most people experienced in politics have no great faith in boards of elections in the first place. But security should be carefully and systematically applied at each location where ballots are delivered.
The citizen activism approach may be flawed. But we have no choice. The danger of suppressing safe voting in a pandemic through starvation of USPS is far greater than any defects in a system that is designed to assure voting by the millions of voters who want to express a preference but do not want to go to the polls and wait for hours to do so.
The system I suggest is nonpartisan. But here’s the message for Democrats: Deliver For Joe and Kamala!