https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/the-wreck-is-in-the-mail/615172/
. . .If Republicans wanted to limit voter turnout and raise doubts about the election’s integrity, creating chaos within the Postal Service and undermining its independence would be an efficient way to pursue that goal.
Past efforts to politicize the mail service were overt. According to the “spoils system” that President Andrew Jackson—whom Trump admires most among his predecessors—established soon after his election in 1828, the party that won the White House gained the right to award tens of thousands of postal jobs to its supporters, thus securing their loyalty and zeal. The postmaster general—inevitably a political crony and fixer eager to do the president’s bidding—became a Cabinet member who oversaw this immense patronage scheme. To shore up his political base, Jackson replaced the postmaster general he inherited from his rival, President John Quincy Adams, with wheeler-dealers who executed a “rotation in office” policy. Jackson’s inexperienced Democratic loyalists replaced many seasoned postal workers who had supported Adams. The strategy also markedly worsened service in the anti-Jacksonian Northeast. Though the spoils system was reviled through the decades by defenders of good government, attempts to reform it—such as the Pendleton Act of 1883, which, among other things, mandated merit-based employment for clerks and carriers in certain post offices—failed to uproot the patronage that supported America’s two major political parties for nearly a century and a half.
In 1970, President Richard Nixon finally ended the spoils system by signing the Postal Reorganization Act. The law turned what had been the Post Office Department into the modern USPS. This government-business hybrid is run by a board of governors nominated by the president and confirmed with the Senate’s advice and consent, and a professional postmaster general chosen by that board.
Recent precedent had favored candidates with a demonstrable commitment to the agency and its work. Of the five people who have held the top office this century, four rose through the ranks: William Henderson (1998–2001), John Potter (2001–2010), Patrick Donahoe (2010–2015), and Meaghan Brennan (2015–2020). The sole exception has been DeJoy, a former logistics-industry CEO who gave millions of dollars to the Republican Party, including the Trump campaign.
As the president’s criticism of the Postal Service mounted this spring, his administration worked to undercut the independence of the agency, which was seeking an emergency loan from a pandemic-relief package approved by Congress in March. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin sought to use the loan as leverage to obtain what the Post described as “sweeping operational control of the Postal Service”—including power over senior-personnel decisions, package pricing, and service contracts with third-party shippers. (Eventually, the Treasury approved a loan subject to less stringent conditions.)
Meanwhile, the new postmaster general is hampering the Postal Service’s ability to operate. In his short time in office, DeJoy has alarmed postal customers and employees alike by cutting pay for overtime work, such as sorting mail and making extra trips, that is sometimes required to ensure prompt delivery. The resulting service slowdowns of a day or more have earned DeJoy the nickname “Louie DeLay.” Far more serious, they can undermine the public’s confidence in the Postal Service’s ability to deliver blank ballots to citizens and then return them to electoral authorities securely and speedily.
Despite the president’s assertion that voting by mail will lead to a “RIGGED Election,” no evidence indicates that the process is anything other than secure, convenient for citizens, and cost-effective for governments. All states have some form of mail-in voting, which is a universal practice in Colorado, Washington, Utah, Oregon, and Hawaii. Far from being a joke, the USPS will be perfectly able to carry out its election duties—unless it is hobbled from within.
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