President Donald Trump’s mail-ballot scheme for the U.S. Postal Service will undermine public trust in a respected agency and potentially put workers in harm’s way, unions representing postal employees warn.
The president issued an executive order earlier this year requiring the Postal Service to create a screening system that would restrict mail voting, a move intended to boost Republican candidates. Voting rights groups are challenging the legality of the order, yet the Postal Service, which Trump is trying to stack with allies, has plowed ahead with trying to build the system ahead of November’s midterm elections.
Jonathan Smith, president of the American Postal Workers Union, said he is worried about both voter disenfranchisement and postal workers being caught in the middle of a political battle. The Postal Service is supposed to be independent and neutral in its handling of the mail — not a gatekeeper to ballots — so Smith fears his members will be inserted into nasty partisan politics, maybe even subject to violence and harassment.
If someone is angry because they didn’t receive a ballot, there is nothing to stop them from showing up at the local post office demanding answers, said Smith, whose union represents 200,000 members, many of them in post offices and sorting centers.
“They’re not going to take it out on the White House,” he told HuffPost. “They’re going to take it out on that frontline clerk, who’s being forced to do something that they don’t even want to do themselves because they’re concerned about the impact and our reputation with the American people.”
He added, “What further pisses me off is that they are putting an executive order in place to resolve a problem that does not exist.”
“They’re not going to take it out on the White House. They’re going to take it out on that frontline clerk.”
– Jonathan Smith, president of the American Postal Workers Union
Trump, who still claims to have won the 2020 election that he lost to Joe Biden, has argued that the changes are necessary to prevent voter fraud. But in reality, voting by noncitizens is extremely rare, and implementing new restrictions could prevent many legitimate voters from receiving their mail ballots.
Smith said some of the union’s members in information technology have been enlisted in developing the new screening system, which, according to a recent whistleblower disclosure, has been dangerously rushed and risks mass disenfranchisement if it’s rolled out on Trump’s timeline.
The whistleblower, whose statement was released by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) on Tuesday, said the agency was trying to build in a matter of three months a system that should take a year or longer to responsibly construct. “The project violates standard principles of testing and debugging new software before launch,” they alleged.
Among the most troubling allegations is that the screening system uses a “zero-percent failure” threshold, meaning if one ballot in a batch of thousands has a problem, then the whole lot is rejected and goes back to the state for verification.
USPS leadership has not shared information on the buildout that the union has requested, Smith said.
He criticized the postmaster general, David Steiner, the former Waste Management CEO whom Trump urged the USPS board to appoint, for following an executive order that “goes against what our mission has always been.”
“The Postal Service does not have to comply with this,” Smith said. “But they seem to be choosing to because Steiner is the pick of Trump and he’s doing what he was put there to do.”
The whistleblower also accused the Postal Service of continuing the project in violation of a federal court order, something the agency denied in a statement Tuesday.
“The United States Postal Service has spent months developing a U.S. Federal Ballot Mail Portal to provide election officials with a simple, secure, and efficient way to share lists of individuals receiving ballots by mail in their respective states,” the agency said. “This work has at all times been conducted in a manner consistent with court orders.”
The agency said it was close to finishing the portal and “will soon make it available to election officials who voluntarily wish to familiarize themselves with the platform.”
Trump’s order directed the Department of Homeland Security to put together lists of eligible voters and send them to the states before federal elections. The Postal Service is supposed to decline to deliver ballots to people who aren’t on these lists, and the agency is now building a portal that would serve as the verification system.
The League of Women Voters and other groups have sued to stop the mail voting restrictions, arguing that Trump is trying to wrest control over elections from the states by fiat, in violation of the Constitution. Last week, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority paused a federal judge’s injunction and allowed Trump to move ahead with the plan as litigation proceeds.
“Rural America relies very heavily on vote-by-mail … To change that will have a dramatic effect on rural Americans.”
– Patrick Pitts, president of the National Rural Letter Carriers Association
The Postal Service delivered 99 million ballots in the last presidential election. A shoddy verification system could disproportionately hurt voters in rural areas where it’s a hassle to get to a polling place. Half of polling places in rural counties serve areas larger than 62 square miles, according to Secure Democracy USA, a group that advocates for mail and early voting.
Patrick Pitts, president of the National Rural Letter Carriers Association, said his members are concerned about how the new system will impact voting in their communities. He said letter carriers expressed “substantial concern” about Trump’s executive order at the union’s recent national meeting.
“Rural America relies very heavily on vote-by-mail, many of them live miles and miles from a physical polling place,” Pitts told HuffPost. “They have grown accustomed over the years to being able to vote and express their opinions via the mail; to change that will have a dramatic effect on rural Americans.”
He argued that turning the Postal Service into an “election enforcement agency” would undermine a hard-won reputation among the American public. The Postal Service is routinely the only federal agency that gets a majority-positive rating in Gallup polls.
“The Postal Service remains one of America’s most trusted public institutions … and it’s because our carriers serve every community without regard to politics,” he said.