Aug 20, 2020 3 min read

Postal service cutbacks function as an attack on democracy.

Laureen Spring noticed it when a birthday card mailed to her sister in Cleveland took more than two weeks to arrive and her prescriptions were delivered a week late. For some of us, it has meant mailboxes oddly empty on some days.

And now we are starting to understand why.

Two of the six high-speed mail-sorting machines at the East 38th Street processing facility have been taken offline as part of a nationwide purge of U.S. Postal Service sorting machines, as reporter Matthew Rink has detailed. Capable of processing 36,000 pieces of mail an hour, they represent a third of the center’s sorting capacity. In some places, mailboxes have been carted away. Stacks of mail awaiting delivery pile up.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a GOP mega-donor, said cost-cutting measures – including overtime and late delivery restrictions – were necessitated by the Postal Service’s longstanding financial woes, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

What the pandemic necessitates instead is a fully functioning Postal Service.

Prescription medications, benefit payments, small business shipments and more are being delayed. That is reason enough for lawmakers, state attorneys general and citizens to demand answers and solutions.

More disturbing and urgent is the context: The nation speeds toward a watershed presidential election. Citizens must have unimpeded access to the vote, especially by mail as a way to exercise definitive rights as Americans safely amid an unchecked, deadly pandemic that spreads when people gather in close quarters.

Instead, the Postal Service recently warned states, including Pennsylvania, that it could not guarantee all ballots cast by mail for the November election will be delivered in time to be counted.

These changes, regardless of how President Donald Trump’s administration or U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, R-16th District, cast them, come at a time when Trump assails without evidence mail-in voting as rife with fraud. He has admitted that he won’t support financial relief for the Postal Service because he does not want to facilitate mail-in voting – which he fears could cost him the election.

Trump says he wants to make the Postal Service great again. Austerity amid a pandemic is no way to reform the ailing service, which is self-funded and not a private business.

Neither the Postal Service nor ballot box access should be partisan issues. Erie’s state delegation is rightly united in its call for mail service to be restored.

This meddling in the nation’s chain of communication, not incidental or benign, represents an attack on democracy either by intent or in effect in the context of a pandemic-era election that could turn on a handful of votes.

DeJoy said Wednesday he would suspend the reforms until after the election, but it was not clear whether changes in place would be rolled back.

Restore unimpeded mail service now.