The-Ave.US

If you want your vote to count …

… mail it First Class. Don’t trust the Postal Service to deliver it on time at the prepaid bulk rate. They probably won’t.

Putting a stamp on your ballot envelope will get it treated as First Class mail, which it then is, which may speed up delivery so it’s received on time and counted. Consider that trivial expenditure an investment in protecting your precious vote.

However, to be completely safe, you should drop your ballot off in an election department drop box, if possible.

President Donald Trump is sabotaging mail delivery because his paths to reelection are rapidly narrowing to one: Keeping people from voting by mail. (Expect massive efforts to challenge voters at polling stations, too.)

So he put a major donor with no postal experience (but who has contracts with the Postal Service that create a conflict of interest) in charge of the agency who is removing mailboxes and sorting machines under the phony guise of fixing the Postal Service’s financial problems.

The Democrats are proposing their own fix: A $25 billion-dollar funding bill. Trump opposes it, and Republicans will block it, because they don’t want to improve mail delivery, they want to wreck it.

The collateral damage includes seniors and veterans struggling to get prescription refills, but this administration seems willing to accept friendly-fire casualties in order to carry out its politically-driven policies, all of which are directed toward a singular goal: Preserving the GOP’s power in a country where Democrats are more popular and Trump himself is deeply unpopular.

Trump lost the 2016 popular vote by nearly 3 million, but eked out an electoral victory by narrow margins in three states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin). Biden currently leads the polls nationally, in all three of those states, and several more Trump won in 2016. But if the race tightens, as expected, massive vote suppression could reclaim enough electoral votes to “reelect” Trump and several endangered GOP senators.

Much of what happens to your right to vote is out of your hands. But if you vote by mail, you can make it harder for them to keep your vote from being counted by the simple expedient of not trusting bulk-mail delivery and putting a 55-cent First Class stamp on it instead.

Wouldn’t it be something if this thug president lost because of 55-cent stamps? Selling all those stamps would help the Postal Service with its financial difficulties, too.*

Update: Postmaster General DeJoy told Congress that ballots in prepaid envelopes without stamps will be handled as first-class mail. Don’t trust him. I don’t.

* I don’t want to go off track here, so I’ll just say the Postal Service’s fiscal crisis is real, but its causes are not, and any claim the Postal Service can’t operate at a loss is baloney. It has for most of its history, for a good reason: Mail is vital to commerce. The fiscal crisis is due to a GOP Congress requiring the Postal Service to prepay employee pensions. No business or other government agency does that.

Nor is any other federal agency expected or required to earn a profit. There’s nothing wrong with subsidizing mail service. What would the economy be like without it? Is there any way on earth that mail delivery to rural mailboxes can pay for itself? Rural highways, schools, and libraries will never be self-supporting; they can’t be. Urban taxpayers and ratepayers subsidize them. And there’s nothing wrong with that, either. We’re one country, in it together, and it’s in our interest that public services are available to everyone, not just those who pay the full freight for them.