New York’s attorney general added Tuesday to the growing pile of lawsuits seeking to halt disruptions to the U.S. Postal Service ahead of November’s presidential election, saying several communities in her state have gone some days without mail.
Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, said the changes imposed by President Donald Trump’s administration amounted to voter suppression with the use of mail-in ballots expected to surge while people stay home because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump is an ardent opponent of voting by mail, even though he has voted by mail himself. He speculates that widespread use of mail-in ballots could lead to fraud.
“These changes are a thinly veiled attempt to advance the president’s own political agenda,” James told reporters on a conference call announcing the lawsuit.
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy announced last week that he was suspending new operational changes to mail service amid complaints that they had led to delivery slowdowns, but that it wasn’t necessary to restore machinery and collection boxes already taken away.
Trump previously acknowledged withholding emergency aid from the postal service to make it harder to process mail-in ballots, but later altered his position, saying he wanted to speed up the mail, not slow it down.
Since March, according to James’ lawsuit, the Republican president has publicly voiced opposition to mail-in voting on more than 30 occasions.
James’ lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington D.C., names Trump, DeJoy and the U.S. Postal Service as defendants. DeJoy, a former supply-chain CEO and major donor to Trump and the GOP, faced grilling questions from Congress in recent days over the changes.
The lawsuit, which seeks a court order to cancel the changes, is the third filed by state attorneys general over alterations to the postal service’s operations.
Last week, Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson and Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, both Democrats, filed lawsuits in collaboration with other states. James said those cases differed from hers, leading her to file a separate lawsuit. James’ lawsuit also includes Hawaii and New Jersey as plaintiffs, as well as the cities of New York and San Francisco.
“We have sought immediately to declare his actions as unconstitutional and to suspend all of those actions immediately, so that we can move forward in our effort to make sure that voting ballots are returned to respective board of elections in a timely fashion,” James said.
Three communities near Buffalo, which together receive about 80,000 pieces of mail each day, did not get a single mail delivery on July 11, according to the lawsuit.
Some New York communities saw mail delivery skipped on at least three days in July and August; boxes of mail slated for delivery on Aug. 7 were still sitting in a Bronx postal facility a week later; and 173 Express Mail packages sent to the Buffalo area went undelivered from Aug. 10-12, the lawsuit said.
Beyond the potential impact on the election, James and members of the state’s Congressional delegation who joined her conference call expressed concerns about the mail slowdown harming everyday lives by hampering deliveries of vital medications, perishable goods and payments.
“People need to be able to vote. Veterans need to be able to get their medication. Seniors and Americans deserve to get payments that they are waiting for by their mail,” said Rep. Grace Meng, a Queens Democrat.
DeJoy told lawmakers on Monday that election mail is his “No. 1 priority.” He said he will authorize expanded overtime, extra truck trips and other measures in the weeks before the election to ensure on-time delivery of ballots.
“I am not engaged in sabotaging the election,” DeJoy said.
(AP)
Join the official YWN WhatsApp status
5 Responses
“Trump is an ardent opponent of voting by mail, even though he has voted by mail himself.”
Of course! Yet another of the many examples of his hipocrisy. This ia about stealing this fall’s election by preventing voting.
More dishonesty from charliehall.
First of all, Trump is against sending unsolicited ballots to every registered voter. Every honest person is against it. Only crooks and supporters of crooks are for it, because it’s a wide-open door for fraud. Boruch Hashem Florida isn’t doing that. But even normal absentee voting is notorious for fraud, and expanding it is dangerous and irresponsible. I don’t think Trump is against that too, but he should be.
So let’s assume he is against it. Why on earth should that prevent him from using it, since it does exist? How would his voting honestly by mail contribute to the fraud that will undoubtedly happen? If an ATM has poor security and people are making fraudulent withdrawals, that’s a reason to urge the bank to remove it, but is it a reason why someone who genuinely does have money in the bank shouldn’t use the ATM to take it out?!
The whole Post Office “scandal” is a huge hoax and a huge lie. There have been no cutbacks at all. The Democrats simply want to give the Post Office a massive extra subsidy, and the President refuses to go along with that. Not giving them billions extra is not a cut! This is the Democrats’ usual swindle, where they say if you don’t give extra, or if you give extra but not as much as they proposed, they call it a cut. Democrats are all liars and cheats and swindlers; it’s in their nature.
And the gift they want to give the Post Office isn’t even related to the election. There’s no mention of elections in the bill. It’s just a multi-billion-dollar bailout for no reason at all.
Lying propaganda. First, the postal changes in question were scheduled under the Obama administration. But more to the point is that each state is individually responsible for its own ballot handling. The problem is those states that have decided to convert to a new system of mail-in ballots (in a time frame of tow or three months) without ever having successfully carried out even as much as a test run on a small sample. The don’t even begin to have the resources (and certainly no experience) to even start something like this. In contrast, a state like Oregon had a 17-year learning curve (1981-1998) before it could get this to work minimally successfully.
The US Postal Service was never even close being a bottleneck.
In 2006 it handled 213.1 billion pieces of mail (4 billion per week).
In 2019 that dropped to 142.57 billion (2.74 billion per week) or 390 million per day.
Even if the entire US population (both eligible and not eligible!) of some 330 million people voted, that would not reach even a single day’s volume for the postal service.
There is good reason to suspect that part of the reason the Democrats are doing this is in preparation for a new version of the Russian hoax conspiracy. Just like the Russian hoax conspiracy was designed in advance as a backup plan in case the Democrats lose, this mail hoax conspiracy is their backup plan in case they lose. Should the Democrats lose, they can use this mail hoax to drag out the election results to 20 January 2021, at which time the Speaker of the House (Democrat Nancy Pelosi!) may take on the role of acting President (or the legislature can itself vote to appoint a President).
charliehall, vote by mail is the only way your fellow Marxist Democrats can still 2020 elections fro senile Biden, especially after all major postal unions endorsed senile Biden.