Jordan Davidson of the Federalist highlights potential problems with election ballots cast by mail.
I didn’t get to vote in the primaries this year. Even though I took all the right steps such as requesting my absentee ballot as early as possible, calling my county’s election office every week to check on its status, double-checking that I filled out the request properly, and opening a case with U.S. Postal Service after it was mailed, my ballot never arrived in my mailbox.
At the time, I was too far outside of the county to travel home and vote, so I had to let it go. It was frustrating and disappointing to find that the same government that I was trying to have a say in took away part of my political voice.
My experience with absentee voting is common. Many people around the United States face challenges when requesting and sending ballots during an election. According to a report released by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), millions of ballots requested or sent by mail were lost in 2016; unaccounted for, and gone without a trace. Additionally, The Public Interest Legal Foundation found through these EAC reports that since 2012, “32 million mail ballots effectively disappeared, went to the wrong house, or were rejected.”
This experience is at no fault of the current executive branch and leadership, but a longstanding example of USPS’s failures. In addition to the large and startling total figure of missing ballots since 2012, USPS lost 28.3 million of those same disappeared ballots.
While many on the left have alleged that President Trump, his staff, and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy are in cahoots this year to conspire against the American people by removing mailboxes and slowing mail processes right before the election, it is clear that they are grasping for straws to grant some political disadvantages.
For years, USPS has been on the decline.