The Postal Service and Election 2020
By John Marshall
This is our Corona election, bringing preventive health care – Covid19 precautions –to the ballot process. Voting by mail is expected to be popular, and the McPherson County Clerk’s office has posted guidelines and instructions.
Recent elections have inspired an urge to persist. The grind of recent campaigns presented Kansas with the poisonous waste of Brownback and Kobach, then an antidote, Laura Kelly. And yet, Trump.
This election brings us the feeling a youngster has at a county fair on a hot midway, the air dusty, barkers braying, calling out their enticements of good lives and better living, exploitation by devices of oratory. We are tired, standing and listening to the slick spiels – listening and knowing all the while that we are about to be taken.
Voters are inclined to think the same, to counter with their ballot.
The August 4 Kansas primary election offers three options:
– Advance voting by mailed ballot (until July 28); Mail ballot applications may be found at the County Clerk’s web site or at the courthouse. They’re easy to complete. Early applications will quicken the return of ballots to voters. Follow the instructions.
– Advance voting in person at the courthouse (July 15 to August 3 at noon); This has been a mainstay for years.
– Voting on election day (7 a.m. to 7 p.m.). The polling place is integral to the voting life of any town. At some places, poll workers have known voters for many years. The know-how of one, the persistence of the other, and the dedication of both enhance the abiding spirit and meaning of the experience.
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Mail ballots involve the Postal Service, an institution that has been with us since the summer of 1775, when the Second Continental Congress created the agency and named Benjamin Franklin the first Postmaster General. With the exception of a handful of federal institutions, the Postal Service has endured in a progressive isolation for centuries. It has been firm footing for this republic, and much of its appeal lies in the dedication and dependability of its employees.
The mail remains an indispensable instrument for meaningful communication and advancement; voting by mail – an absolute freedom to express ourselves – reinforces this instrument.
Employees at the Lindsborg Post Office are among the 633,000 Postal Service employees (100,000 are veterans) who comprise almost a fourth of the federal workforce. They work at 32,000 post offices and a half-million processing and distribution centers. They handle 142 billion pieces of mail yearly – about half the mail in the world.
They can handle the mail ballot.
All this bothers the Trump administration, which has moved to dismantle the agency. The president has demanded the Postal Service quadruple charges for package deliveries before he blesses the Service’s $10 billion line of credit already approved by Congress. Every member of the agency’s governing board is now a Trump appointee, and last month Trump named Louis DeJoy, the finance chairman of the 2020 Republican National Convention, and a heavy Trump campaign donor, as the new postmaster general.
The Postal Service faces a $13 billion operating deficit and is expected to run out of cash by September. It wasn’t always this way. By 1982, the agency was operating entirely on fees and postage revenue, and without federal money. But in 2006, the (Republican) congress passed legislation that prevented the Service from raising rates by more than the Consumer Price Index. This, despite soaring fuel prices, cargo flight leases, health insurance premiums and other increasing expenses. The legislation also ordered the Postal Service to “pre-fund” employee pension and retirement costs, including health care, for the next 75 years.
In the year that legislation passed, the Postal Service logged a $900 million profit. Since then, it has been in the red. Clamps on its ability to meet higher costs with additional revenue ensure the imbalance. In addition, those mandated 75-year, pre-funded retirement benefits cost more than $5 billion annually. No other employer is forced to provide retirement benefits for employees who have not been hired, let alone born.
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The Postal Service has been abused by a president who called it a “joke” and denounced by critics who would “privatize” the mail. Imagine our letters and parcel delivery left to a hedge fund.
In the foaming currents of global turbulence, the Postal Service maintains our founders’ conviction that mail delivery is more than moving thoughts and goods among the far corners of America. The Postal Service is crucial to uniting the sprawling and diverse interests of one of the globe’s largest nations.
Fundamental to those interests is the vote, the mail ballot. It is crucial that we save the Postal Service, and with it our elections.
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