Another Outrage

Donald Trump wants as few people as possible to vote in November. That's because, almost without exception, Republicans always do better when voter turnout is low, but Democrats prevail when voter turnout is high.

With the Covid-19 pandemic, however, many states are gearing up for a majority of people to vote by mail and many states have expanded the ease of vote-by-mail. This includes red states, notwithstanding that mail voting usually results in a high participation and favors Democrats.

As a result, Trump is doing everything possible to block mail-in voting. His campaign has sued in at least forty-one states to challenge new, expanded mail-in vote rules. Trump is also suing to block states from adopting ballot drop-off locations.

And now, he's throwing the Postal Service into chaos and causing long mailing delays so that vote-by-mail will be unreliable. And he's admitting openly he's doing this by blocking funding to the Postal Service to ensure that as few mailed ballots arrive in time as possible for the election day deadlines (details here) and here).

Trump's new head of the Postal Service has utterly no relevant experience, but he gave millions of dollars to a pro-Trump political action committee and is a die-hard supporter. And now Trump's fanboy running the post office is taking sorting machines all over the country offline for no apparent reason, which is slowing mail delivery (details here), as well as removing mailboxes on the street.

Trump's rationale for ordering this is the bogus claim that mail-in voting is plagued by massive fraud. He provides no proof of this, quite simply because it does not exist. This is standard Trump behavior — lie about something then refuse to provide any evidence to back up his claim.

This may all blow up in Trump's face, however. Countless millions of Americans still rely on a functioning post office to receive checks and prescriptions, for instance. Indeed, Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg News shows in an excellent piece published yesterday (link here) how Trump's handing an election issue to his opponent and pissing off millions of people by delaying their mail so they're angry enough to pay attention and vote against Trump, in person if necessary.

I suspect the reason he's doing this out of desperation. He's running far behind his opponent in virtually every poll and there's no sign he's catching up or can close the gap by election day. So now he's panicked and trying anything to keep himself in power, even if that means endangering millions of Americans by forcing them to vote in person.