In this semiquincentennial year, when our towns have been awash with patriotic events and remembrances, I have been pondering the role of the post office in the formation of this country and current attempts to use it to diminish our free and democratic right to vote.
One could argue that the post was seminal in the political foment that led to revolution and the establishment of our freedoms. Committees of Correspondence became key communications systems during the early years of the American Revolution as towns, counties and colonies wrote to each other to express ideas, complain of local grievances, confirm mutual assistance and debate and coordinate resistance to British imperial policy. The network created by these committees organized and mobilized hundreds of communities across the British North American colonies, including those in the tristate region.
As shots were fired in Lexington and Concord in 1775, postal communications became even more important and the Second Continental Congress eschewed its old reliance on the British postal service and established the American postal system on July 26, 1775, appointing Benjamin Franklin as the first Postmaster General. With “rapid” communication necessary between Congress, its armies and revolutionary leaders, postmasters and post riders were exempted from military service. So, it can be said with some confidence that early post riders helped the new nation to gallop toward independence.
Following the revolution, in 1792, George Washington, Benjamin Rush and James Madison decided to enhance use of the postal network even further to create an informed electorate. They devised a kind of Robin Hood scheme that set high postage rates for letters and used the profits to subsidize the cost of mailing cheap, uncensored newspapers to every citizen so that they could understand public affairs before they cast their votes.
It is ironic, then, that there has been a years-long effort in the 21st century to both destabilize the postal service and to complicate mail-in voting in ways that could prevent millions of legitimate electoral ballots from being counted.
The crisis started with the millennium as emails drastically reduced the postage paid for first class letters and then deepened with the disastrous Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, which restricted the postal service’s ability to offer new services or adjust its pricing to meet costs. Worse, it required the USPS to prefund its retiree health care benefits decades into the future, which created billions of dollars of debt. No other federal agency is subject to such a mandate.
Following his appointment by a bipartisan Board of Governors, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy implemented swift cost-cutting measures in mid-2020 prior to the presidential election. Critics claimed this was a deliberate attempt to slow down mail delivery and disrupt mail-in voting and multiple federal judges temporarily blocked these changes, with one ruling that the policies were rooted in “partisan politics” and resulted in “voter disenfranchisement.”
The continuing cash crunch at the postal service has since resulted in closing post offices, cutting opening hours, removing mailboxes, staff reductions, reduced amounts of overtime, a shift from air to ground transport that extends delivery times by an extra day or two in many areas, and consolidation of regional processing centers—meaning that afternoon mail collection has been removed for thousands of post offices more than 50 miles from a Regional Processing and Delivery Center.
USPS devised its 10-year “Delivering for America” plan, published in March 2021, which further reduced the dependability of an institution that has previously prided itself in delivering on time. It allows up to 30 percent of first-class mail to take up to five days to deliver instead of three. Attorneys general from multiple states filed lawsuits, claiming these changes bypassed proper regulatory oversight and harmed public service. Even with extended timeframes for the delivery of letters and packages, USPS has not met most of its service targets since lowering them.
But perhaps the most perfidious change for would-be mail-in voters, is the fact that the postmark on your mailed ballot could be stamped days after it is put in the mail. Mail dropped in collection boxes or local slots now receives a postmark showing when an automated facility sorts the mail, which can be several days after drop-off.
The postmark will not affect Connecticut voters, where the ballot must be physically in the hands of poll officials by 8 p.m. on election day, but may disenfranchise voters in 19 states where late votes are tallied and those mailing ballots from overseas. The only way to avoid a late postmark is to have staff manually stamp it in the post office or to purchase certified/registered mail for guaranteed time-of-acceptance proof.
President Trump, who frequently votes via a mail-in ballot, is an outspoken critic of mail-in voting and his administration has sought valiantly to complicate the issue even more by requiring states to provide the federal Department of Homeland Security with lists of all adults qualified to vote and those to whom absentee ballots were issued. He signed an executive order to this effect in March, but the order is temporarily stayed by a Massachusetts federal judge while it is battled out in the courts.
Opponents argue that it is—A: unconstitutional because the Constitution mandates that election laws are under state supervision—which includes the tabulation and tracking of mail-in ballots—and B: would create chaos because the timeframe for responding to the order was too short to be enacted for the mid-term elections.
The chaos could have been compounded by a brand-new system for screening mail-in ballots that, by the account of one whistleblower, was built in a matter of months against the advice of the agency’s own staff. The whistleblower asserted its production was so rushed and untested that it risked mass rejection of legitimate ballots.
Since both Democrats and Republicans can vote by mail it would seem a strange thing for conservatives to focus on, but statistics show it to be a field well worth the battle for the president. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, the voting method has been adopted much more widely, and Democrats have made gains among these voters. Thirty-seven percent of Democrats reported voting by mail in 2024, compared to 24 percent of Republicans, according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Election Data and Science Lab.
That gap was even wider in 2020 when 60 percent of Democrats reported voting by mail compared to 32 percent of Republicans. This, of course, was the election Trump continues to assert was “stolen” from him.
The U.S. Postal Service has been an essential part of America’s fabric for 250 years. One can only decry the manipulation of a vital service for political profit. Perhaps the USPS should change its motto from, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” to include “political chicanery.” Politicians seem to have done more to stay swift completion of the service’s “appointed rounds” than Mother Nature ever could!
Kathryn Boughton is Editor of the Kent Dispatch. The views she expresses in this column do not necessarily reflect those of the Board of Directors of Kent News, Inc., the Dispatch’s parent company.
