We’ve known all along that the Trump administration would be declaring war on voting by mail as the primary means of sabotaging and stealing the November midterms, so no expressions of shock, please.
Outrage? Sure. There’s already more than enough of that to go around. But let’s also understand that pre-knowledge of exactly how they’re planning to pull off this criminal interference gives us a fighting chance to stop it from happening at all. He slipped up by showing his hand.
What it probably can’t prevent is the purposeful sowing of chaos around the election, which is already in full swing. And we’re all just going to have to live with that and beat them at their fraudulent game, anyway.
Here is where these assassins of democracy have already won: we no longer trust the system to perform in anything approaching a straightforward fashion. Can you honestly say you’re certain that your vote-by-mail ballot will arrive in your mailbox in a timely fashion? Do you have absolute faith that if you stick your completed ballot in the mail, it will get counted as it should?
I didn’t think so.
Trump and his corrupt minions have successfully transformed a system that was a relative afterthought into an ordeal. That’s why a lot of people, me included, are now seriously considering voting in person or using a dropbox to ensure we’re part of the tally.
And again, I well understand that this is precisely the point of why the president is doing all he can to destroy confidence in our mail vote. Thousands, maybe millions, of voters could be so frustrated by onerous new guidelines and declarations of a broken system that they won’t bother voting at all.
It’s the ultimate example of fixing something that ain’t broken. In this case, “fix” is very much the operative word.
With the Trump-appointed Postmaster General David Steiner overseeing the U.S. Postal Service, none of us should be assured that anything surrounding this election will work as expected. He is just another high-level flunky placed in his job to do his boss’s bidding. That means making sure that voting-by-mail – which typically favors Democratic candidates – fails miserably.
What’s to stop USPS from “forgetting” to deliver millions of ballots in blue states in particular? Oops. Hey, mistakes happen, sorry. No matter how many lawsuits that might trigger, there would be no do-overs. The Trump-loving justices on the U.S. Supreme Court will see to that.
This does not, however, mean there aren’t honest, concerned citizens in positions of authority who are determined to do the right thing. And that alone should give us a small measure of hope.
Earlier this week, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) – the top-ranking Democrat on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations – exposed what appears to be the plot to steal the midterms through our postal system.
Blumenthal released a letter calling attention to a whistleblower report that warned of the “potentially catastrophic problems in the development of the United States Postal Service’s…new system for handling federal election ballot mail.” It noted that the “process for the creation and implementation of an entirely new and untested set of IT systems” for delivering ballots to voters for the midterm election has been “secretive, rushed, chaotic and fundamentally flawed.”
No big surprise here. It’s a no-brainer that Trump wouldn’t very well back a system that actually improved the mail-in vote. Catastrophe is, after all, the point. But the whistleblower’s description is nonetheless altogether chilling.
The complaint continues, “The administration has hidden the high likelihood that the new ballot mail verification processes will result in major disruptions in mail ballots ever getting delivered to voters. As presently designed, if even one bar code on one single ballot in a bulk mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to properly scan during the verification process, the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the state – effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed to voters.”
The complaint also points out that it would normally take nine months to a year or more to effectively roll out a project “of this complexity, magnitude and importance.” This one’s being rushed through in a mere five months, with work on it having begun only in June.
Just think about that. This could, as the whistleblower confirms, result in “potentially millions of American voters (not receiving) their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all.” The complaint theorizes that in terms of the new system, catastrophic failure “would be a feature rather than a bug.”
Indeed, the administration apparently believes this breakdown-by-design would give them cover. They could say, “Hey look, we were only trying to bring the mail voting system up to a technological standard that guarantees a crackdown on fraud. We can’t help it if there were so many fraudsters trying to game the system that it resulted in devastating delays.”
Sen. Blumenthal pointed out this week that the role of the USPS is restricted to being a carrier of mail, not a political portal. It’s being asked to cross a serious line by taking an active role in deciding who should receive mail-in ballots and who should not. He called on Postmaster General Steiner to “abandon this ill-conceived, unconscionable plan and ensure that all Americans can exercise their constitutional right to vote, including by mail, without interference by USPS.”
I’m not holding my breath that Steiner will do the right thing and halt work on this partisan project before it’s too late for the one-third of all voters who count on the mail system to cast their ballots. If he does, you know Trump would only replace him with a crooked loyalist who will continue to jam it through in defiance of a court order.
What we also can’t count on, of course, is for the Supreme Court to step in and save us. They have their own agenda, and it isn’t to secure an honest vote. Thus, if you have an alternative to mailing it in this time, do it. The vote you save may be your own.
(Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.)