By Julie Hollar
Fair

More than six weeks after a bill was introduced to require vote-by-mail to be available for the November 3 elections, no federal steps have been taken to ensure a fair and free election in the shadow of a pandemic that threatens people’s ability to access the polls.

In fact, while some states scramble to put together vote-by-mail plans—shouldering the financial burden themselves—others are doing nothing, and New York went so far as to cancel its presidential primary. Meanwhile, commenting on Fox & Friends (3/30/20) about the Democratic vote-by-mail bill, Donald Trump said the quiet part out loud:

The things they had in there were crazy. They had levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.

Atlantic (4/24/20: “The Postal Service has been under attack by conservatives for years.”

Now, with the US Postal Service reeling (like so many others) under the economic impact of the pandemic, Trump has revived the right-wing crusade to privatize all mail and package delivery, threatening to refuse desperately needed aid for the Postal Service unless it quadruples its rates, cuts service and guts its union—which provides hundreds of thousands of secure middle-class jobs. Without federal aid, the USPS will run out of money by September; adopting Trump’s measures will effectively drive the USPS out of business, as competitors undercut its rates (Atlantic, 4/24/20).

In either case, the Postal Service’s ability to handle a crush of mail-in ballots in November would almost certainly be threatened. The right-wing vendetta against the Postal Service long predates the pandemic, but gutting it now has the potential to undermine the integrity of the November election. Yet establishment media seem remarkably uninterested in connecting the dots […]

Via https://fair.org/home/newspapers-wont-connect-the-dots-on-postal-service-threats/