In the wild speculation around the U.S. Postal Service the past few days, we’re now recognizing what may be the explicit point of contention as the United States prepares to bungle the transfer of power, a result of our stark internal division. In a divided nation like ours, an elite and partisan media comfortable during the economic crisis in their redoubts outside of our major cities refuse to cover the Postal Service issue with the clarity it demands. And we’ll all suffer for it.
In the commentary, you’ll hear also about President Trump’s widespread mistrust of the historic expansion of vote-by-mail that was being pursued by the Left pre-COVID, but given a kickstart during the crisis. What’s left unstated is the radical steps a number of states have taken, some dismantling basic voter verification efforts opposed by activists long before the pandemic and some even going so far as to use the pretext of the pandemic to mail ballots to every single voter on the rolls – a practice which does little to help likely voters and much to encourage fraud and abuse. Instead of the more reasonable loosening of absentee ballot rules, which require voters who actually intend to vote to request a ballot, these states will flood mailboxes, residences, and businesses with ballots from our notoriously inaccurate voter rolls, and provide ample space for fraud, abuse, and the concerted efforts of ballot bundling activists. This will also additionally allow for the continued meddling in the form of the diaspora vote, in which young sophisticated urbanites living in NY, D.C., and LA commit small-scale but consistent voter fraud by casting their votes in their Midwestern and mid-Atlantic home states from their parents or other previous addresses, imposing their will and values on their former neighbors.
Over the next few months, you’ll also have the repeat playing of an extra card that President Trump unwisely gave the media when he commented that he will not accept the election results in certain circumstances. That comment smoothed the groundwork currently being laid to preemptively skew public opinion against and delegitimize any reasonable, fact-based concerns about results in states that Republicans lose. This is important given the 2018 playbook Democrats pioneered of counting ballots delivered after Election Day and refusing to concede elections. The practice run went well.
The country has already been asked to swallow two major changes to how Americans vote, efforts both well underway before COVID-19 devastated ’20. We are told to accept that our elections are no longer point-in-time assessments of public opinion, but instead seasonal ground-game contests with ever-shifting deadlines and rules. Secondly, we’re asked to countenance historic changes to how Americans vote, and that any worry about the security of these new processes unfamiliar to most Americans is either racist or reactionary. We’re told not only to swallow these things, but that the very legitimacy of the election hinges on our acceptance of them. These changes, we’re told, are somehow inconsequential despite a 2016 decision in Wisconsin that hinged on 13,000 votes. Maine by even fewer, at only 2,701, though they do not have a winner-take-all electoral college requirement.
But more important than the math behind our extremely tight national elections is what all of this means for the peaceful transfer of power. As the change in the rules that the historic and widespread expansion of vote-by-mail represents comes to the foreground, we’ve found the process issue over which to apply our stark divisions and via which we’ll litigate the contested outcome: reform of the U.S. Postal Service.
In about 75 days, as we’re fighting in the figurative and maybe literal sense, it won’t matter much who the propagators of the USPS story were – the former POTUS, Pelosi and the popstars – it’ll only matter that they wrapped themselves in conspiracy over country. 2016 did not go the way that the Left envisioned, so they had to find a way to change the rules.