“More than 150,000 ballots were caught in U.S. Postal Service processing facilities and not delivered by Election Day,” the Seattle Times reported on Friday, November 6, 2020. The Times said that number “is expected to grow as more data is released in coming days.”
The USPS “acknowledged in a court filing Thursday that thousands of ballots had not been processed in time,” the newspaper said. The Postal Service has been under a judge’s orders to conduct sweeps of mail processing facilities, find ballots, and deliver them.
Some of those ballots will be counted, if the post office can be compelled to finally deliver them, but some will be disqualified because they weren’t delivered by election day. Mail ballots have tended to heavily favor Joe Biden.
Trump appointed a donor with conflicts of interest (his company has lucrative postal contracts) as postmaster general, apparently with orders to sabotage mail delivery. The appointee, Louis DeJoy, the multimillionaire owner of a logistics company, removed mailboxes and sorting machines, prohibited overtime, and enacted other measures to undermine mail delivery. Many of these actions were reversed by the court, but the extent of DeJoy’s compliance is in question.
DeJoy’s actions also had unintended knock-on effects, such as veterans not receiving their VA prescription refills.
The Biden campaign, of course, was well aware of Trump’s efforts to block mail voting, and “changed its messaging to encourage voters to use drop boxes or vote in person.” Republicans responded by removing drop boxes, too. For example, in Texas, the Republicans there limited drop boxes to one per county, which meant that in the Dallas area there was only one box for over 2 million voters.
Despite Trump’s efforts to sabotage the election, an American public determined to remove him from office apparently has succeeded in overwhelming his and the GOP’s massive vote suppression efforts.
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