Voting by mail opens another front in the electoral battle in the US

A person deposits letters in a postal service mailbox in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on Aug. 14.Rachel Wisniewski / Reuters

Voting by mail has opened a new front in the electoral battle in the United States. The postal service has warned many states that there is a great possibility that the ballots that citizens send may not be processed in time for the elections to be held on November 3. In July, the USPS sent letters to 46 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia to explain that they expect participation by mail to be substantial and that there is a “significant risk” that it will not. the deadlines established by law to deliver and receive the votes can be met.

This form of suffrage has gained relevance in the face of the coronavirus pandemic and the USPS estimates that requests for voting by mail are 10 times higher than in other electoral processes. Among the states that have received the notice are decisive territories for the final result such as Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The notification comes as the president, Donald Trump, questions the validity of the system and argues, for weeks and without any proof, that the electoral procedure leads to fraud and facilitates identity theft.

Trump has attacked the postal service and has described it as deficient and incapable, while he has refused to authorize 25,000 million dollars (about 21,100 million euros) to modernize it and 3,600 million dollars for an extraordinary fund dedicated exclusively to voting for mail. “Now they need that money to run the post office so it can accept all these millions and millions of ballots. But if they don't get those resources, it means that you can't do universal voting by mail, ”the US president said Thursday in an interview on Fox News. However, Palm Beach County, Florida, Trump and his wife, Melania, have already asked to vote by mail in another election process.

Difficulties for the US postal service have increased since May, when Trump appointed Louis DeJoy, a Republican who often makes large campaign donations, as CEO. Since he has been in office, DeJoy has adopted measures that affect the operation of the service, including the suspension of overtime for workers, the decrease in the use of official transport, the restriction on the use of electronic equipment to process the mail and freezing new hires. This Saturday, a group of protesters stood outside the building where DeJoy lives in Washington to demand his resignation.

These actions and the controversy generated around the postal service also raises doubts in the face of the next elections. Although the USPS has 91% approval among Americans, according to a poll conducted in April by the Pew Research Center, in the 2016 elections 0.25% of the ballots were rejected because they arrived outside the established deadlines. This same year, during the primaries, the postal vote suffered several incidents: in Georgia some voters never received the ballots and in New York a judge requested a recount of thousands of votes that had been rejected for being late, which delayed the results during one month.

A few weeks ago, former President Barack Obama pointed out, during the funeral of Congressman John Lewis, that the USPS was being "undermined" before the elections with "surgical precision." Voting by mail has become a fundamental way out to avoid coronavirus infections. This Friday, Obama has returned to the charge and has explained in a tweet that the deterioration of the post office can mean "collateral damage" for millions of Americans who use its services. In addition, he accused the Trump Administration of being "more concerned with suppressing the vote than suppressing the virus."

The postal service's notice of the problems it foresees in the November vote has become another argument by Democrats against Trump, which they accuse of trying to suppress votes. "The president made it clear that he will manipulate the operation of post offices to deny voters suffrage and to favor their re-election," the Democratic leaders in Congress, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, have denounced in a statement. One of the postal service unions, with 300,000 affiliated workers, has in recent weeks endorsed the Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden.

In recent days, the postal service began removing hundreds of mailboxes from the streets of New York, Montana, Pennsylvania and Oregon, arguing that they were relocating them to areas with higher postal traffic. The USPS has about 142,000 mailboxes across the country. The removal has been halted after hundreds of people on social media reported the mailboxes missing.