Just over three months before the November general election -- where mail-in voting is expected to play a big role in New York -- Representatives Carolyn Maloney and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are sounding the alarm over President Donald Trump's efforts to defund the U.S. Postal Service in order to thwart mail-in voting.
Those changes, made by Trump donor Louis DeJoy who was appointed to postmaster general by the president, include the suspension of overtime for letter carriers and reduction in mail service. Proponents of free and fair elections fear that mail-in absentee and affidavit ballots will not reach voters in time or be delivered to the respective boards of elections in time.
The vote-by-mail process has already proven problematic for New Yorkers who did not receive their ballots in time for the June primary, where mail-in ballots played a big role because of the pandemic. The mail delivery snafus resulted in over 90,000 ballots deemed invalidated because they were delivered to boards of elections days after the primary.
New York has already seen some changes take effect after DeJoy was appointed in June, including the removal of mail processing machines at the Morgan General Mail Facility in Midtown.
"You don't come in with proposals that slow down the mail, right in the middle of a pandemic when people are more dependent on mail than ever for their medications and other deliveries in front of a very important presidential election that we just have every four years," Maloney told Gothamist shortly after a news conference Saturday where she called out changes to USPS that have raised red flags.
Her comments come a day after Ocasio-Cortez held a virtual town hall that touched on DeJoy's appointment, but laid out concerns for the November general election.
"There's just an enormous amount of incentives that not only makes this appointment corrupt, but also when you layer it on top of the fact that that the President wants to essentially de-legitimize mail-in voting. The way that you do that is by dismantling the Postal Service," said Ocasio-Cortez. "I won't lie to you all, I am extremely, extremely concerned about what will happen to one of our most beloved public services and agencies between now and November."
Ocasio-Cortez added that the USPS "is being sabotaged by this administration. They're trying to dismantle it. It is horrifying."
The USPS has struggled financially over the last decade, largely because of a federal rule in 2006 that required the USPS to fund its own pension funds for the next several decades.
On Thursday, Trump said he opposed funding USPS and even objected to mail-in voting, suggesting without any proof that it somehow favors Democrats. In a phone interview with Fox Business, Trump said Congressional Democrats "want 25 billion dollars for the Post Office. They need that money so that they can have the post office work and it can take all of these millions of millions of ballots."
"I think that there is interference, because the President himself said on national television Thursday night, that he did not support the funding for the Post Office, and that he literally admitted that he was opposed to mail-in voting. He said it. And I can't think of anything more undemocratic than saying you oppose mail and voting when obviously in the in the face of a pandemic, more people are turning to mail-in voting," Maloney said.
An investigation into the changes has now been ordered by Maloney via her position as chair of the House Oversight Committee. A hearing is scheduled for September 17th with DeJoy expected to appear.
At the USPS’s last Board of Governors advisory group meeting, DeJoy insisted that the president is not trying to undermine the election.
With 5 million absentee ballots projected to go out in New York State for the general election, Governor Andrew Cuomo floated an alternative to mailing in ballots at a news conference on Friday, suggesting the state consider using secure drop boxes for mail-in ballots for those losing faith in USPS. New Jersey already had a drop box system in place for their July primary.
“Why couldn’t you have a box … that you drop your ballot into the box and the box is a board of elections box?" said Cuomo. "Either at a polling site or in front of a polling site so you don’t have to walk into the school. Why not?”
