Trump Admits He Opposes Funding USPS To Limit Mail-in Voting

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The capacity for that kind of blind devotion is what's so terrifying.

Intentional rigging or not this election is going to be a big time disaster. It can go wrong in so many ways for so many reasons. This country has increasingly shown poor ability to do basic stuff.

I do not buy that because mail in voting works in Oregon means it will work America wide.

I suspect many of his followers wouldn't have a problem if he declared himself President for life with absolute power.

I suspect many of his followers wouldn't have a problem if he declared himself President for life with absolute power.

Intentional rigging or not this election is going to be a big time disaster. It can go wrong in so many ways for so many reasons. This country has increasingly shown poor ability to do basic stuff.

I do not buy that because mail in voting works in Oregon means it will work America wide.

Voting by mail has worked without a hitch in my state of Washington, too, as it has in other states. I really don't see where the problem would arise, save for Trump trying to F*ck it up.

More than a month after New York’s June 23 primary elections, state election officials are still counting votes. In some legislative districts, they haven’t even started counting absentee votes. In the best-case scenario, election officials hope to declare winners by the first Tuesday in August—six weeks after Election Day. It might take a lot longer than that. Election officials in New York City have already invalidated upwards of 100,000 absentee ballots—about one of every five that were mailed in from the five boroughs. And furious candidates are already filing lawsuits charging discrimination and disenfranchisement.

The chaos in New York is a warning about November’s elections: Voting is being transformed by the pandemic. But no state has built new election infrastructure. No state has the time or the money to make sure vote-counting will go smoothly in November. And just about every state is about to be hit with a massive surge of absentee ballots.

“This is what happens,” a New York election official told me over the phone last week, “when you jury-rig a system that hasn’t been designed or implemented or tested before.”

In New York, the election infrastructure was overwhelmed by a massive increase in voters requesting absentee ballots rather than risking voting in person. Ballot-printing firms couldn’t keep up with demand, and the already rickety U.S. Postal Service didn’t move the ballots to and from voters quickly enough. Election officials, meanwhile, have seemed more interested in pointing fingers than in solving the problems.

“It’s a nightmare in an age of political paranoia,” says Ritchie Torres, a city councilman who is currently in the lead for an open congressional seat in the Bronx—the bluest district in the country—but who is still waiting on the final result.

Every election in the past few months has provided more evidence of a system that isn’t able to keep up with the coronavirus. Wisconsinites waited to vote for hours in the rain wearing makeshift masks. A police officer in Washington, D.C., reportedly tried to disperse a crowd waiting to vote, because the people in line were breaking a curfew established in response to the George Floyd protests. More people than ever are voting by mail, and election officials are invalidating more votes than ever because of technical errors. In Georgia, 943,000 primary voters turned in absentee ballots, a 2,500 percent increase from the 2016 primary.

New York’s June elections were primaries for local races—assembly and state Senate and Congress—with no partisan change in power at stake and a much smaller pool of voters than a general election. New York is a solidly Democratic state, with a Democratic governor, and all the officials who matter said they were committed to expanding voting by mail and other options. And it was a disaster.

Imagine what happens when the results matter more. Imagine it’s December 5, a month after the national elections in the fall. Is President Donald Trump ahead, or Joe Biden? Who’s ahead in close House races? Senate races? Local races for mayor or state legislature? Are votes still coming in? Are they being contested? Who’s making the decisions? Which courts are getting involved? Recounts, if they’re needed, would be in … January? February? When is the presidential election going to be called? When will every seat be filled for the next session of Congress?

Trump isn’t likely to patiently and calmly wait as more votes are counted—especially if he’s behind. In an interview on Fox News that aired on Sunday, he already refused to commit to accepting the results.

“In the world where the election tightens, if there are swing states for the Senate, or certainly the Electoral College, that have an absentee process that’s as poor as what happened here in New York City, it could be catastrophically bad for the future of American democracy,” says Brad Lander, a city councilman from Brooklyn who’s been trying to call attention to the disproportionately high rate of absentee ballots officials have invalidated in his borough.

Elections in New York have always taken place against a backdrop of corruption and incompetence, patronage and piddling, whereby democracy runs up against bureaucracy and usually gets a concussion. The New York City Board of Elections has a central office, but also five borough offices that run semi-independently, overseen by 10 commissioners appointed by the Republican and Democratic Party chairs of each borough. Forget about administering elections—officials can’t even place a letter of reprimand in an employee’s file without at least six votes from the board.
And the mess goes far beyond the Board of Elections, which has figures showing that 767,000 people requested absentee ballots, and that 403,000 returned them. The state canceled its Democratic presidential primary in late April after the race effectively ended, but then the courts heard a lawsuit brought by the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang and ultimately reinstated the presidential primary. The state didn’t start printing ballots until the decision came down, in mid-May. No information about when the ballots were mailed has been made public, but the two vendors the state hired to print and mail the ballots have told officials they couldn’t keep up with the requests, because the demand was so much higher than normal. Thousands of ballots weren’t returned in time, and thousands more arrived without any postmark; the board ruled that those votes couldn’t be counted. The board also moved polling sites, which meant that tens of thousands of people were forced to use what’s called an affidavit ballot, by filling out a form declaring that they’re eligible to vote but weren’t showing up in the official system.

Among the people who actually received their absentee ballot, thousands made mistakes like not signing in the right spot on the back of the envelope or mistakenly putting the voting instructions in the mail with their ballot. The people who got that far did better than many others. Plenty of New Yorkers never received the ballots they requested, or received them only on Election Day. The summer heat broke the glue on some sealed envelopes; post offices didn’t postmark them properly.

The dysfunction is too inane to be called Kafka-esque.

“There are tens of thousands of New Yorkers, and unfortunately it may be hundreds of thousands, who genuinely believe that their vote has been counted—for reasons that are absolutely appalling and egregious,” says Michael Blake, an assemblyman from the Bronx who is hoping to take the lead against Torres for an open congressional seat in the Bronx. As more ballots have been counted, Torres’s lead of 4,516 votes on Election Day has grown to 7,803 votes, according to a readout Torres tweeted on Wednesday.

About 19,000 absentee ballots were submitted in that race, but Blake says he can’t get the Board of Elections to tell him how many of these votes are left to count, or how many have already been invalidated. He sent me photos of stacks of affidavit ballots that the Board of Elections isn’t counting even though they’ve confirmed the voters as Democrats and residents of the district. The board tossed them because the voters didn’t check a box noting the reason why they needed an affidavit ballot.

When elections go this wrong, suspicion takes root. Blake, for example, says that there have been intentional efforts to stand in his way as a Black man trying to represent the Bronx, and has filed a lawsuit alleging racism. “Suppression doesn’t just happen in the South; it’s happening in the South Bronx,” he told me. (Torres identifies as Afro-Latino himself.)
Torres told me the problems and delays are “cause for concern when it can change the outcome of the election. If there is an election where a candidate is ahead by only a few votes, then the invalidated ballots should be examined with the highest possible scrutiny.” But he’s confident he’ll hold his lead, so he’s trying to be more patient. “I would rather the Board of Elections get it right than get it done hastily,” he said, though on Wednesday morning he declared victory, tweeting, “The counting is all but over … Even if our nearest rival were to win every single [remaining vote], we would remain ahead by a wide margin.”

There’s not much guilt or regret at the Board of Elections. The country is in the middle of a pandemic, officials there reminded me. There were a lot of ballots to count. Taking two months to figure out who won an election is nothing to be ashamed of. The candidates and campaigns that are complaining, they argue, are just sore losers looking to blame the system instead of themselves. “We adhere to the rules set forth by the state board of elections and the legislature,” the board’s spokesperson, Valerie Vazquez, said.

Suraj Patel, who’s hoping to take the lead against Representative Carolyn Maloney in a district that covers parts of Manhattan and Queens and a sliver of Brooklyn, would probably count as one of the candidates being dismissed as a sore loser. He agrees with the Board of Elections’ general assessment of itself. “There’s no malice in this three-week delay. It’s just disorganization and incompetence,” he told me. About 40,000 people voted in person in his district. About 65,000 people returned absentee ballots. There was a 648-vote difference between the two candidates on Election Day. The Board has already thrown out 13,000 absentee ballots. But the numbers I obtained show major disparities in the percentage of absentee ballots invalidated in each of the three boroughs.

Patel said his campaign is looking at thousands of other votes that seem to be missing postmarks entirely—a post-office error, but one that the Board of Elections can cite to throw out ballots—but which seem to have arrived on time. His campaign aides are objecting to all ballots like that being rejected, but he said they’ve been told by the Board of Elections that it has clear instructions from its lawyers not to count those votes, even if both campaigns were to agree to count them. He sent me a photo of a box of 3,000 absentee ballots from just one part of the district that have been ruled invalid because they lack a postmark. Last Friday, he sued the governor and the Board of Elections over the ballots being thrown out because of this. “This is election theft,” he told me.

Rules are rules, is the counterargument. No one wants an unsecured election, right? If the people wanted their votes counted, they should have voted properly—requested the ballots, filled them out properly, returned them in time. That’s basically the line Maloney took in a statement her campaign emailed to me. "While everyone wants the results to be certified, we can't sacrifice accuracy for speed when it comes to something as critical as people’s vote,” she said. “Elections workers who are putting everything they have into getting ballots processed as quickly and accurately as possible. Registered voters went to great lengths to participate in this primary, and we owe it to them to ensure that this process is handled with patience and integrity.”
Maloney’s argument doesn’t hold up, counters Zohran Mamdani, who spent weeks waiting to hear if he’d won a primary for an assembly seat in Queens before his opponent conceded on Wednesday. Mamdani’s district has a large South Asian population, with many residents who immigrated from countries where elections are farces—and this is now what they’ve seen of American elections.

“In many ways, it confirms the biggest fears of so many people who don’t get engaged: How can I trust the results? How can I know if my voice means anything?” Mamdani told me. “I’m not here to say the Board of Elections is tampering with these votes, but three and a half weeks without results, it doesn’t help build trust in elections.”

On Wednesday, the New York state legislature passed bills extending the period in which absentee ballots can be accepted. But with 101 days until the general election, there’s not enough time to make substantive, tested improvements to the voting process in New York—or anywhere else.

The United States Postal Service has warned election officials in 46 states and the District of Columbia that their absentee voting rules are “incongruous” with the agency’s mail delivery service standards and may result in uncounted ballots, raising further alarms with the viability of a voting platform millions of Americans are expected to use in the run-up to the November vote.

In recent weeks, postal service General Counsel Thomas Marshall penned letters warning that states may be over-estimating the speed with which ballots will move through the mail. If the post office is not afforded a few extra days of leeway to deliver ballots to the election offices, Marshall warned that late-arriving ballots could leave some voters disenfranchised.

Only four states received a clean bill of health: Nevada, Rhode Island, New Mexico, and Oregon. Among those with laws that concern the postal service are several key swing states in the upcoming election.

In Pennsylvania, for example, the deadline to request an absentee ballot is one week before election day​, and Michigan allows requests up until four days before. But in order for it to be counted in either state, under current laws, the ballot must be back in the mail and returned by 8 p.m. on Election Day. One week for two deliveries is not enough time, Marshall explained. He said it could realistically take more than a week for a piece of mail to be sent to the voter and then “returned by mail in time to be counted.”

“Under our reading of your state's election laws … certain state-law requirements and deadlines appear to be incompatible with the Postal Service's delivery standards and the recommended timeframe,” Marshall wrote, according to one of the letters made public in a court filing Thursday.

“As a result,” he continued, “to the extent that the mail is used to transmit ballots to and from voters, there is a significant risk that, at least in certain circumstances, ballots may be requested in a manner that is consistent with your election rules and returned promptly, and yet not be returned in time to be counted.”

Applications and ballots in Pennsylvania may still be delivered to a voter's county election office in person by the specified deadlines.

Marshall’s letter to Pennsylvania was made public in a court document filed late Thursday as part of a lawsuit brought by progressive organizations in April. In the filing, Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania’s chief election official, encouraged the state’s supreme court to allow absentee ballots received after Election Day to be counted as valid – yet another sign that Americans may have to wait days to learn the winner of the upcoming presidential vote.

The remarkable extension request was prompted by Marshall's letter sent two weeks earlier warning Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kim Boockvar that the state’s absentee voting rules “are incongruous with the Postal Service's delivery standards,” effectively posing the risk of inadvertently disenfranchising some voters.

Marshall notes in his letters that the postal service issued this same warning to states in May, at which time the agency suggested that election leaders re-examine their absentee voting rules to account for mail delivery standards of service, which are two to five days for First-Class Mail and three to 10 days for Marketing Mail.

But in their filing Thursday to the Supreme Court, lawyers representing Boockvar argue that in its July 29 letter, “The Postal Service’s announcement represents a significant change to the outlook for voting by mail in the general election” – a reference to possible delays in mail service.

As such, to avoid the “statewide risk of disenfranchisement for significant numbers of voters utilizing mail-in ballots,” lawyers writing on Boockvar’s behalf asked the court to “order that ballots mailed by voters on or before 8 p.m. on Election Day will be counted if they are otherwise valid and received by the county boards of election on or before the third day following the election.”

Despite what would appear to ensure a delay in announcing a winner in the state, lawyers for Boockvar add that they “do not expect that such an extension would create any significant delay in the reporting of Pennsylvania’s election results.”

The late-in-the-game legal jockeying in Pennsylvania comes amid increased scrutiny of the postal service, which has come under fire in recent weeks after its new postmaster general, the longtime Republican financier Louis Dejoy, enacted a series of procedural reforms that critics say will cause delays in mail service.

Those reforms have coincided with a deluge of unfounded attacks on the validity of mail-in voting from President Donald Trump, exacerbating fears that DeJoy’s changes to mail delivery could serve political means of undermining the absentee vote. The postal service and the White House have repeatedly denied those accusations.

For their part, Democrats welcomed the absentee voting extension request in Pennsylvania. Late Thursday, in an email to supporters, Marc Elias, a lawyer who represents progressive groups who brought the lawsuit, lauded the decision as “GREAT news.”

“Thanks to our lawsuit and this concession, millions of Pennsylvania voters -- many of whom will cast their ballot by mail for the first time -- now won’t have to worry about their ballot not counting due to mail delays,” Elias wrote.

In a brief interview with ABC News, Elias said Thursday he was “very concerned” about the latest warnings from the postal service. “It’s why we continue to litigate… around the country,” he added.

Election experts note that voters are empowered to avoid having their ballot rejected by requesting and re-submitting their ballots early in the process – not waiting for the deadline.

“The Postal Service recommends you mail your ballot back at least one week before the deadline before election day. And we know that almost half the states allow you to request a ballot after that time,” said Tammy Patrick of the nonpartisan Democracy Fund.

“In fact, there's seven states that allow you to request it on Monday for Tuesday's election,” she continued. “And that's just not practical. Just because you can wait until a deadline, doesn't mean you should.”

the rest of the world sees us descend into failed state status, and is aghast.

Why wouldn't mail in voting work?

If people are so concerned about voting fraud, they can keep the voting office open all week long or for a few weeks before election day so everyone can get the chance to vote. Not everyone can vote on election day due to work or because of location or because they live in a rural area. Not everyone can drive.

And yet, prior to this year they have managed to get to the voting location without issue on the one specific day...

Maybe, a larger venue allowing for greater spacing between people (or additional venues) might work better?

Correct me if I am wrong but is this really a strategic move by Trump to sure up his votes in November (e.g. Democrats are more likely to do the right thing and stay home and post their votes whereas Republicans will march in droves to polling booths without masks?)

Or is this more to do with Nancy Pelosi's estimate that postal votes will cost $3.5Billion and Trump hates Pelosi and hates the idea of giving money to something Pelosi suggested?

Or is it both?

Absentee or mail in voting has existed in some form in America for over 200 years. It was mostly used for soldiers on campaign or otherwise occupied for the first few decades of US history. It's been much more widespread some nice the start of the 20th century.

You want to talk about changing the way we voted for 240 years in a way that undermines democracy? Let's talk about voter ID laws. Out grandparents did not need IDs to vote. Were the elections they voted in illegitimate then? The fraud 'prevented' by these laws is negligible and easily investigated and corrected.

Voter suppression has just taken on more respectable justifications since the Voting Rights Act. Why don't we just bring back literacy tests and poll taxes while we're at it? It comes from the same voter suppression playbook the south used for centuries.