Imagine that you tune in your television to watch a baseball game. Then, oddly, before the game starts, the umpires appear on camera and announce that they favor the visiting team, not yours, to win.
Would you accept their calls of balls, strikes, or other close plays during the game? If your team loses by one run, would you suspect that unfair “umpirial” bias caused this outcome?
Democrats are pressing to hold this November’s election not by people crowded at polling places during the coronavirus pandemic, but by perhaps 100 million Americans sending in their ballots by mail.
At first, this seems a prudent way to reduce the spread of COVID-19, letting seniors and other vulnerable citizens vote from the safety of their own homes. We already have five states where elections are routinely conducted via mail: Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Utah and Hawaii.
But then, days ago, the “umpires” of voting-by-mail quietly announced that they favor one side in what was supposed to be a fair, impartial voting process.
More than 93% of mailed-in ballots will be carried, without any poll watchers present, from a mailbox near your home to the place of counting by one or more of up to 277,000 members of a labor union, the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC), AFL-CIO.
Like most labor unions, NALC tilts a bit to the left and favors the Democratic Party. During the latest off-year election cycle in 2018, it made political contributions to federal candidates of $1,342,000, of which 77% went to Democrats. Labor unions remain the biggest source of funding to Democratic candidates.
Days ago, NALC formally endorsed Joe Biden for president, which means that a hefty hunk of letter carrier dues will almost certainly fatten his campaign coffers. But worse, this union attacked President Donald Trump, accusing him of being an enemy of both NALC and the United States Postal Service.
“In 2018,” said NALC President Fredric Rolando, “legislative recommendations from the White House Postal Task Force report called for the revocation of collective bargaining rights by America’s postal unions, massive cuts to services, and the potential privatization of the agency.”
“Since that time,” Rolando said, “we have continued to see the administration take steps outside of the public eye to undermine the Postal Service and letter carriers.”
Reading between the lines of his statement, Rolando’s message to individual letter carriers is clear: President Trump’s reelection would be a direct threat to your job, your paycheck, your benefits and your juicy retirement pension.
Every unionized letter carrier, therefore, has a powerful personal financial motive to vote for and assist Joe Biden, as the USPS did in 2016 by enabling unionized workers to improperly engage in political activity by helping Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Almost all letter carriers are honest. But Rolando’s shrill warning might motivate some to manipulate the ballots entrusted to them. Hundreds of ballots mailed by Republicans or in Republican neighborhoods, for example, might get discarded and never delivered for counting. Suspiciously large numbers of blank ballots sent to one address in a Democratic neighborhood could go unreported.
Such things have already happened, and they could tip a razor-thin election in Biden’s favor. Upwards of 40% of Republicans worry that an election by mail increases the risk of their ballots not being counted.
Voters fear that states like California and Nevada will create a tidal wave of blank ballots and allow “ballot harvesting” to make stealing this November’s election easy. If legal chaos delays results, after Jan. 20 a newly reelected Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could succeed to the presidency as the terms of President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence end.
Truth is, the post office was never securely designed to keep elections honest.
With the 1970 Postal Reorganization Act, the Postal Service became “a corporation-like independent agency” of the federal government. USPS is required to deliver mail anywhere at a universal rate. It has a monopoly on First Class mail and the legal power to raid UPS and FedEx warehouses and impose huge fines if it finds them shipping a personal customer letter.
“UPS and FedEx are doing fine,” said Barack Obama. “It’s the post office that’s always having problems.” The U.S. Postal Service is a jobs program, obsolete and inefficient in our age of digital communications, and $70 billion in debt.
But USPS reportedly recently filed a patent for a blockchain-based secure-voting system. Our democracy may be “going postal” from now on.
Lowell Ponte is a former Reader’s Digest Roving Editor. His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and other major publications. His latest paper co-authored with Craig R. Smith, “The Secret War,” shows how to rethink several areas of investment to protect and grow your savings against little-known economic threats. For a free, postpaid copy, call toll-free 800-630-1492.
