All the mailboxes in my neighborhood disappeared last summer. As a result, I had to drive to a post office to mail bills and letters. Then, this week, the mailbox that used to be at the grocery store a couple blocks from my house reappeared as if by magic. It’s not hard to figure out why: The election is over.
That wasn’t all. Trump’s lackey postmaster general (a rich guy whose company has contracts with the Postal Service; can you say “conflicts of interest”?) slowed mail processing and delivery, too. As a result, veterans and seniors experienced delays in getting prescription refills. Maybe some people got their bills late, and had to pay late charges on them. It imposed burdens on businesses.
All of this was done to interfere with mail voting, which is allowed in every state. In Washington, where I live, all voting is by mail, and has been for years, because it saves taxpayers money. In this part of the country, many people have jobs that take them away from home (fishermen, airline pilots, ship crews, truckers, etc.); and there’s no other way for many of our military personnel to vote.
It’s one thing to game an election; GOP vote suppression has been around for a long time (which doesn’t make it right; it should be criminalized). It’s another thing to go to the extraordinary lengths Trump did to take away our right to vote. It didn’t work; tens of millions of Americans went to whatever lengths they had to — braving Covid-19, inclement weather, standing in line for hours — to turn him out of office.
Now his lawyers are asking judges to throw out millions of those votes, with no evidence or justification, just made-up pretexts, while the president and his legal team wallow in ridiculous conspiracy theories.
I don’t understand the 74 million people who voted for him. Just as a highway has guardrails, there are guardrails by which we judge people — honesty, truthfulness, morality, ethics, loyalty, law-abiding. Trump spectacularly fails all of those tests, yet 74 million people voted for him anyway. What were they thinking?
Trump is still flailing away, but power is slipping away from him, and it looks like his power over mailboxes is already gone.