How did the Post Office become integral to the functioning of a free and fair society, and has it always been politicized? To answer these questions, I recently spoke by phone with Winifred Gallagher, the author of “ How the Post Office Created America,” which tells the story of the institution’s creation in the eighteenth century and describes its role in the United States through the modern era.
“If they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.” “They need that money in order to have the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” he said, of Democrats’ pandemic relief bill, which includes funding for the Postal Service and state election officials. And, last Thursday, in an interview on Fox Business Network, Donald Trump said explicitly what many people have suspected.
The Postal Service, which was experiencing delays even before the latest cuts, recently warned forty-six states that it may not be able to deliver ballots in time for them to be counted. But a new Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, recently made major cuts to the Postal Service, raising fears that Republicans are trying to defund the Post Office, delay deliveries, and cause late-arriving ballots to go uncounted in November. This November, record numbers of people are expected to vote by mail, in large part because of the coronavirus pandemic.
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