We Get Letters, We Get Letters-- Or At Least We Used To... Before Trump Hired Louis DeJoy To Destroy The Post Office

Louis & Donald Fix The Post Office by Nancy Ohanian

I'm absolutely positive that Trump gave DeJoy a blanket pardon before DeJoy went for work for him. Either that or DeJoy is plum loco. On Tuesday DeJoy issued a disingenuous official statement on his disenfranchisement shenanigans, acknowledging that the postal service which he has been systematically disrupting, "will play a critical role this year in delivering election mail for millions of voters across the country... I want to assure all Americans of the following:

• Retail hours at Post Offices will not change.
• Mail processing equipment and blue collection boxes will remain where they are.
• No mail processing facilities will be closed.
• And we reassert that overtime has, and will continue to be, approved as needed.

When he said "mail processing equipment and blue collection boxes will remain where they are," he meant in the land-fills they've already been dumped in.

And when he said "overtime has, and will continue to be, approved as needed," he meant by his own lackeys who are have basically two jobs:

• Destroy public trust in the post office so it can be sold off and privatized.
• Disenfranchise Democratic voters to help Trump steal the election.

Not part of the public statement, though, was the order he gave not to reconnect and mail sorting machines and not to reinstall any blue boxes he had ordered removed. This was a memo from one of DeJoy's stooges, Kevin Couch the national director of Maintenance Operations:

Please message out to your respective Maintenance Managers tonight.

They are not to reconnect / reinstall machines that have previously been disconnected without approval from HQ Maintenance, no matter what direction they are getting from their plant manager," wrote Kevin Couch, Director of Maintenance Operations. "Please have them flow that request through you then on to me for a direction."

A follow up e-mail to every regional maintenance manager read: "We are not to reconnect any machines that have previously been disconnected." This was (in part), Pelosi's statement after she met with DeJoy on Wednesday: "The Postmaster General’s alleged pause is wholly insufficient and does not reverse damage already wreaked.  The Postmaster General frankly admitted that he had no intention of replacing the sorting machines, blue mailboxes and other key mail infrastructure that have been removed and that plans for adequate overtime, which is critical for the timely delivery of mail, are not in the works.  All of these changes directly jeopardize the election and disproportionately threaten to disenfranchise voters in communities of color.  At the same time, we are highly concerned that the slowdown of the delivery of medicines to veterans is not being sufficiently addressed."

90 Members of Congress-- all Democrats-- sent the 6 members of the Postal Service's board of governors a letter calling for the dismissal of DeJoy, also on Wednesday. "We write to urge you to immediately remove Postmaster General Louis DeJoy," they began, "using your powers under 39 U.S. Code § 202. Mr. DeJoy has used his time as Postmaster General to sabotage the United States Postal Service (USPS) and he must be removed immediately to protect this critical institution. Despite recent claims by Mr. DeJoy that implementation of certain changes may be delayed, he has already done considerable damage to the institution and we believe his conflicts of interest are insurmountable.

And that brings us to a worrying assertion by top investigative journalist Greg Palast that voting by mail with DeJoy running the post office "is playing Russian Roulette with your vote." He recommends that "since voting in-person on Election Day can kill you, to avoid the pitfalls of vote by mail, get your absentee ballot from your local county Board of Elections and return it there. Or, use drop boxes in states that have them. Otherwise, ask for your ballot at least 8 weeks before the election. In most states, you can take the mail-in ballot to an early polling station-- and safely drop it off."

Palast told radio host Mike Papantonio that an MIT study found that even pre-Trump 22% of all vote by mail ballots don't get counted. One in 10 people who ask for absentee ballots never get them and one in 5 mailed-in ballots get junked. When Papantonio asked him "How safe is vote by mail," he responded that it isn't. "you can have all these jerks in Hawaiian shirts, the Boogaloo Boys, the Proud Boys, they're going to go in… Trump’s calling for 50,000 volunteers. It's not an intimidation army. People have that wrong. The real danger’s that are going to go in and say, I don't like that signature on that ballot. That ballot was taped shut instead of a sealed shut by licking the envelope. I'm not kidding. And if you think it's just Republicans who do that, in New York this past last week the Democratic Party challenged the counting of 28,000 mail-in ballots-- the Democratic Party. Once they established that precedent, how many ballots do you think Trump's people will challenge? How many millions I should say. So it's not safe to mail in your ballot."

He reminded his listeners that the Democratic Party in California shafted Bernie out of 553,000 votes in the March primary. "That's what the Democratic Party did. But nationwide, what you have is a mass wipe out of voters by the Republicans. We've had a big purge of the voter list. 16.7 million people, according to the federal government, have been erased from the voter rolls. They're going to have a tough time getting their mail-in ballots if you're not on the voter rolls. And the Republicans have learned from the Democrats in New York and the Democrats in California and throughout the nation they're going to be challenging every single mail-in ballot that comes in."