JAMES FINKELSTEIN: Vote as if your life depends on it

“What’s going on with Trump and the post office?” Byron York of “The Washington Examiner” asks in a column in Friday’s newspaper on the editorial page. Mr. York notes that “Barack Obama said Trump is trying to kneecap the vote,” and “Nancy Pelosi has called the House back into session ‘to address the sabotage of the Postal Service’ …” Then he answers his own question, stating flatly: “A look at the facts simply does not support the Democrats’ allegations.”

You are wrong, Mr. York. These aren’t “Democrats’ allegations.” These are the outcries of postal workers with huge mounds of mail piling up for days because of the intentional disruption of mail service by the newly appointed Postmaster General, Louise Dejoy. But instead of looking at the recent facts involving the disruption of the postal service and Mr. Trump’s frank confession that he is doing so because if he doesn’t, he’ll lose the election, Mr. York cites irrelevant statistics regarding how well the postal service functioned before Mr. Dejoy was put in place by Trump’s hand-selected Board of Governors in June of 2020. Mr. York does cite some awesome, accurate statistics regarding the capacity of the Postal Service to deliver mail, referring to “142.5 billion pieces of mail” which comes to “147 million per day.” But that was in 2019.

Mr. York attempts to explain the current evisceration of timely mail delivery by claiming — with no evidence whatsoever — that slowdowns are caused by workforce availability due to the coronavirus pandemic and that facilities are being closed temporarily to clean them during the outbreak.

But when Dejoy took office in June of 2020, COVID-19 had been raging for at least three months, with tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of cases. And up until the moment Mr. Dejoy came into power, there were no complaints about delayed mail, removed and destroyed massive sorting machines, cuts in workers’ overtime delaying mail delivery, mail piling up in distribution centers for days, and mailboxes being removed from public areas, none of which have anything to do with COVID-19.

Nor was there a “Friday Night Massacre” where 25 top postal executives were removed or re-assigned by Dejoy in an effort to impede the efficient working of a system which has over 600,000 employees, including 100,000 military veterans. Nor was there an abrupt notification sent to all States by Dejoy that their mailed ballots would now be charged 55 cents each instead of the bulk mail rate of 20 cents each, more than doubling the cost as they tried to ensure the safety of its citizens by allowing universal voting by mail, as five States — Utah, Colorado, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii — have done for years.

None of that occurred before Dejoy took over the Postal Service in June of 2020, even with the raging COVID-19 pandemic. And how do we know this? Because the postal workers who are on the ground, who are seeing this with their own eyes, have told us. And they have photographs of the huge mounds of mail piling up, of sorting machines that were removed or destroyed without being replaced, of hundreds of mailboxes side by side in a sort of mailbox graveyard.

And Trump has not been coy as to why he wants to destroy the United States Postal Service. It is because, as he admitted out loud, if people can vote in large numbers, he’ll lose:

“The things they had in there were crazy,” Trump said of the voter protection and expansion proposals in the [House of Representatives] bill. “They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” That was on March 31, 2020, on live television, to his favorite program, “Fox and Friends.”

It is also noteworthy that Mr. York failed to mention the huge conflicts of interest that Mr. Dejoy has, having invested millions of dollars in competitors’ companies that will profit if the Post Office is destroyed. These conflicts were raised shortly after his appointment, and they make his actions all the more suspicious.

Finally, Mr. York didn’t mention the fact that the Post Office sent out a public notification to 46 states that their voters’ ballots might not be counted because delays in mail service would cause them to arrive after the deadline for counting those votes. And there’s only one reason why Trump and Dejoy would do this: to scare voters from voting by mail, reduce the total number of votes cast, and give Trump some shot at snatching a victory that the majority of the country’s voters do not want him to achieve.

So what are we going to do about these unprecedented efforts by a President of the United States and his hand-picked Postmaster General to destroy the Post Office to win an election? Vote. Vote as if your life depends on it. Then hold them accountable and send them to prison. Because every one of the foregoing actions is a felony in violation of the laws of the United States, including 18 U.S. Code § 1703, which carries a five year prison sentence for the intentional delay or destruction of mail.