USPS turmoil being inflated by the left

Claims of attempted voter suppression are unfortunately fueled by President Trump’s habit of stream of consciousness commentary. There are real problems with a precipitous switch to all-mail voting in states that haven’t prepared the way, but the U.S. Postal Service isn’t one of them.

In an effort to tamp down catastrophizing voices like the ones at the Democratic National Convention this week, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy chose to postpone making any changes in postal service operations until after the election. This was immediately seized upon as proof of a voter suppression conspiracy in an election predicted to include a record-high number of mailed ballots.

The post office conspiracy theory doesn’t hold up when put into context. Or more accurately, whether it holds up or not depends on your context.

While mail in central Washington ZIP codes will continue to go to Yakima and Wenatchee for processing until after the election, mail in Eastern Washington has been going to Spokane’s facility for years. A birthday card mailed in Colville to a neighbor across town or even to the next PO box in the lobby has to make the trip via Spokane.

Betty Benton, who retired from the USPS after 29 years of service, was the last regular postmaster in my home village.

“I used to go through the mail and pull out the Edwall addresses, but I wasn’t supposed to,” Benton said.

She still had a hand cancellation stamp at the time of her retirement in 2012, but said the postal service at that time was either pulling them from service or simply not providing updated date inserts. Even if a small post office has kept its local mail slot, it’s probably all going in one bin and being shipped to central sorting, Benton said. It just makes you feel like you’re still getting that hometown same-day service.

Mail volume peaked in 2006. The postal service has been struggling financially for years for many reasons. Cutting services and consolidating facilities is not a new idea, but directly subsidizing postal service operations by congressional appropriation is a major change in policy. It needs thoughtful discussion, a rarity in an election season during a pandemic.

Centralization of mail sorting centers has been going on under a series of postmasters general attempting to run a self-sufficient agency while demand for services is dropping and number of address points served is increasing. When the mail processing facility in Pasco closed in 2012, the Tri-City Herald reported the postal service was “studying 252 of the nation’s 487 mail handling facilities for possible closure.” A total of 141 processing facilities were closed in 2012.

In 2014, an additional 82 processing facilities were scheduled to close, but the closure was postponed with those in Congress under political pressure not to lose jobs in their districts. Closures were postponed again in 2015 even though The Hill, a respected publication focusing on the national political scene, reported: “Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe and other postal officials have long said that the agency was saddled with too many processing centers, given the dramatic drop in first-class mail volume in recent years.” The same article noted, “Postal unions were quick to criticize the consolidations, which will lead to delays in mail delivery that labor groups say will reduce confidence in the postal system.”

That still sounds familiar five years later.

In other words, the proposed closures in Wenatchee and Yakima are part of a larger plan for consolidation. The typical reaction from the public sector unions is to whine, and whoever the postmaster general is then postpones until the political fire blows over.

If your personal context tells you the president is a horrible person and there must be something nefarious afoot, or if you are a Democratic political strategist looking to score points by feeding that narrative, then of course you puff up the 2020 postponement timing and point to threats of lawsuits as the only thing heroically stopping an election meltdown.

If your personal context tells you the postal service is a byzantine bureaucracy moving slowly with its own agenda, public sector unions hate any change that might result in loss of membership, and the president is misquoted so often who knows exactly what he meant by whatever he said, then your reaction is different.

The current trumped-up claims of a conspiracy to sabotage voting, purportedly hatched by a postmaster general only in office for two months, are cynically political.