Officials in four U.S. states say that local postal workers have been spotted yanking collection boxes—those iconic blue steel public mailboxes where people can drop off their letters—from different locations in New York, Oregon, Montana and Indiana.
After several U.S. senators and state governors complained and demanded answers, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) said their removal was due to vandalism and “cost-saving measures” for boxes that had low use. The USPS pledged to stop removing the boxes until after Election Day.
Nevertheless, it’s still worrying because the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) didn’t tell anyone they were gonna remove the boxes in the first place, providing no transparency or accountability for their plans. Also, it’s 80 days until the election where millions of people are expected to vote by mail to avoid COVID-10 in public polling places, the Postmaster General handpicked by President Donald Trump’s appointed board has taken deliberate steps to slow mail processing including reducing post office hours, shutting down 10 percent of mail-sorting machines nationwide and informing 46 states that mailroom slowdowns may result in as many as 226 million mail-in ballots being thrown out if they’re not counted by or shortly after Election Day (as many state laws require).
Even former Democratic President Barak Obama accused Trump of being “more concerned with suppressing the vote than suppressing a virus.”
State legislatures could pass laws extending the vote-counting window for mail-in ballots. There’s also a campaign to get as many able-bodied people to vote in person on Election Day as possible to ensure their votes are counted, and another campaign to get people to drop their mail-in ballots directly to their local supervisors of elections while finding out how to track their votes to ensure that it’s counted.
But we should expect the Trump Administration to keep up such shenanigans up to and after Election Day.