As USPS revenues plummeted due to the virus, and as service deteriorated, Trump made little attempt to hide that the dismantlement was being done at least in part to undermine the service's ability to deliver ballots that he thought (correctly) might threaten to end his presidency.
The USPS is one of the U.S.'s most cherished institutions, regularly listed as the public's favorite government-related operation. Anger over its dismemberment has been palpable.
"In the Postal Service's 240 years of delivering the mail, how can one person screw this up so fast?" Rep. Stephen F. Lynch (D- Massachusetts) asked DeJoy amid angry congressional hearings in August. "What the heck are you doing?"
DeJoy told Congress his "cost-cutting" measures were necessary and offered assurances that the fall election's ballots would be efficiently handled.
But very long delays prompted election protection advocates who'd supported voting by mail to push early voting or depositing ballots in official drop boxes.(Ohio and Texas responded by limiting drop boxes to one per county.)
Tennessee Democratic Rep. Jim Cooper told DeJoy: "For anyone thinking of voting absentee, the effect of your changes is to move Election Day from November 3 up to something like October 27."
As Trump's Republicans demanded ever-more stringent deadlines for receiving ballots at postal centers, the courts finally stepped in. As of November 3, USPS records in various states showed more than 300,000 absentee ballots had been received but had not gone back out to the election boards.
Such numbers could easily determine the presidency, especially in the swing states. (As of this morning, Michigan's margin of victory for Joe Biden is around 35,000, Wisconsin's around 20,000 and Nevada's less than 10,000.)
U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of Washington, D.C., had ordered on September 28 that the USPS cease its delivery cutbacks before the election.
On November 3, Judge Sullivan ordered DeJoy to sweep Postal Service facilities in a dozen key districts where those 300,000 ballots had been reported undelivered. Sullivan's order included processing centers in Detroit, Houston, Atlanta and Philadelphia, as well as in central Pennsylvania, south Florida, South Carolina, Colorado, Wisconsin, Illinois, Arizona, Wyoming and Alabama.
Sullivan particularly focused on districts with low on-time delivery records, including Philadelphia and Detroit.
Sullivan responded with fury. "I'm not pleased about this 11th-hour development last night," he said in a hearing Wednesday. "Someone might have a price to pay."
But the whereabouts of those 300,000 ballots remains a matter of dispute, as does their potential impact on the outcome of the presidential election.
That the ballots might be missing is "inaccurate," says a USPS spokesman. The service took "extraordinary measures" to deliver those votes.
In a court filing, the USPS said that many ballots may have been delivered without being scanned. But if they were not marked as sent, zealous Republicans would be happy to toss them all as lacking a proper postmark or date stamp.
Some of the USPS's harshest critics now tend to believe such problems may be overstated, and that the Postal Service which has been reporting to Judge Sullivan may be its own worst enemy. Vice's Aaron Gordon downplays the situation as a product of the USPS's own questionable reporting.
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