We aren’t going, so if someone wants to download the PDF and go in our place, you can download the PDF here.
You can also get a ticket at Evenbrite for yourself. It’s free.
My suggestion is that if you go, you wear a K-Pop T-shirt, and when Mike Pence walks onto stage, start chanting, “How’d you launder the Saudi kickback money, Vice President Pence.”
The Baltimore post office sat on 65,000 pieces of political mail for at least 5 days before the primary.
Not ballots, mind you, but this is just the dress rehearsal.
It’s a great way to depress turnout at the (overwhelmingly Democratic) Baltimore City:
An audit of U.S. Postal Service performance during this year’s primary election season has found 68,000 pieces of political mail sat untouched at a Baltimore mail processing facility for five days ahead of the June 2 primary.
The audit published Monday says the mail, sent May 12, “sat unprocessed” for five days before being discovered by management at the facility.
Baltimore was in the midst of several contentious political races at the time, including those for mayor, comptroller and City Council president. Numerous candidates for those offices spent thousands of dollars on campaign mailers in an attempt to sway voters in close primaries.
Ballots destined for those voters also were in the mail stream during the window when the political mail sat at the facility, but the audit specifically stated the delayed pieces were not ballots. “This was First-Class campaign mail from a political candidate,” according to a footnote in the report.
I’m going to drop off my ballot this year.
Donald Trump has now definitively stating that he is blocking US Post Office funding in an attempt to sabotage vote-by-mail:
President Donald Trump said on Thursday he was blocking Democrats’ effort to include funds for the U.S. Postal Service and election infrastructure in a new coronavirus relief bill, a bid to block more Americans from voting by mail during the pandemic.
Congressional Democrats accused Republican Trump of trying to damage the struggling Postal Service to improve his chances of being re-elected as opinion polls show him trailing presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
Trump has been railing against mail-in ballots for months as a possible source of fraud, although millions of Americans – including much of the military – have cast absentee ballots by mail for years without such problems.
Trump said his negotiators have resisted Democrats’ calls for additional money to help prepare for presidential, congressional and local voting during a pandemic that has killed more than 165,000 Americans and presented logistical challenges to organizing as large an event as the Nov. 3 elections.
“The items are the post office and the $3.5 billion for mail-in voting,” Trump told Fox Business Network, saying Democrats want to give the post office $25 billion. “If we don’t make the deal, that means they can’t have the money, that means they can’t have universal mail-in voting.”
Trump later said at a news briefing that if a deal was reached that included postal funding, he would not veto it.
So, he is admitting that he wants to squelch vote by mail, but it’s too much of a wimp to veto a relief bill.
In any case this will not prevent Trump and his Evil Minions™ from actively sabotaging Post Office operations:
The United States Postal Service is removing mail sorting machines from facilities around the country without any official explanation or reason given, Motherboard has learned through interviews with postal workers and union officials. In many cases, these are the same machines that would be tasked with sorting ballots, calling into question promises made by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy that the USPS has “ample capacity” to handle the predicted surge in mail-in ballots.
Motherboard identified 19 mail sorting machines from five processing facilities across the U.S. that either have already been removed or are scheduled to be in the near future. But the Postal Service operates hundreds of distribution facilities around the country, so it is not clear precisely how many machines are getting removed and for what purpose.
Even to local union officials, USPS has not announced any policy, explained why they are doing this, what will happen to the machines and the workers who use them. Nor has management provided a rationale for dismantling and removing the machines from the facility rather than merely not operating them when they’re not needed.
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While the consequences of this new policy are mostly unclear for now, it neatly fits with the sudden, opaque, and drastic changes made by DeJoy, a longtime Republican fundraiser and Trump donor, in the less than two months he’s been postmaster general. Like his other changes, including the curtailing of overtime resulting in the widespread mail delays and sudden reorganization of the entire USPS, it is possible to see some semblance of corporate logic while second-guessing the decision to make drastic changes on the eve of the presidential election in which the USPS will play a critical role.
This is literally page 1 of the despot’s play book, and if it were happening in Venezuela Mike Pompeo would be condemning this as an affront to democracy.
The new head of the U.S. Postal Service established major operational changes Monday that could slow down mail delivery, warning employees the agency would not survive unless it made “difficult” changes to cut costs. But critics say such a philosophical sea change would sacrifice operational efficiency and cede its competitive edge to UPS, FedEx and other private-sector rivals.
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told employees to leave mail behind at distribution centers if it delayed letter carriers from their routes, according to internal USPS documents obtained by The Washington Post and verified by the American Postal Workers Union and three people with knowledge of their contents, but who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.
“If the plants run late, they will keep the mail for the next day,” according to a document titled, “New PMG’s [Postmaster General’s] expectations and plan.” Traditionally, postal workers are trained not to leave letters behind and to make multiple delivery trips to ensure timely distribution of letters and parcels.
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The Trump administration has consolidated control over the Postal Service, traditionally an apolitical institution, during the pandemic by making a financial lifeline for the nation’s mail service contingent upon the White House political agenda. President Trump in April called the agency “a joke” and demanded it quadruple package rates before he’d authorize any emergency aid or loans.
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“This is framing the U.S. Postal Service, a 245-year-old government agency, and comparing it to its competitors that could conceivably go bankrupt,” said Philip Rubio, a professor of history at North Carolina A&T State University and a former postal worker. “Comparing it to U.S. Steel says exactly that ‘We are a business, not service.’ That’s troubling.”
The changes also worry vote-by-mail advocates, who insist that any policy that slows delivery could imperil access to mailed and absentee ballots. It reinforces the need, they say, for Congress to provide the agency emergency coronavirus funding.
These changes achieve 2 goals of Trump and his Evil Minions™: Shafting Amazon, and suppressing the vote to boost his own reelection chances.