Under ordinary circumstances, the U.S. Postal Service would be perfectly equipped to manage the surge of mail ballots during the 2020 elections. Experts predict that more than 60 million Americans will vote from home over several weeks. (More than 14 million citizens have already cast ballots.) That’s only a modest uptick in mail volume compared to, say, the Christmas season, when the USPS delivers roughly 28 million packages a day.
But these aren’t ordinary circumstances. Donald Trump’s Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, has already slowed down the mail through a raft of policy changes, including removing sorting machines that could whiz through mail ballots. And the president has admitted to blocking funding to the USPS to undermine its capacity to handle election mail. There’s a reason for that. The president and his GOP allies have indicated that they would use a slow tally of absentee ballots to contest the election results. (Trump said he is “counting” on the Supreme Court to “look at the ballots.”)
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