TheEconomistAugust 22nd 2020 231T
he republican partygoes into its vir-
tual convention next week in a mess.
According to The Economist’s election mod-
el, the president is trailing by nine points
in the popular vote and is currently expect-
ed to end up roughly 70 electoral votes shy
of the 270-vote threshold on polling day.
But has Donald Trump found a way to stack
the deck in his favour? A large number of
Americans will cast votes by post between
now and November. And the usPostal Ser-
vice, which has to deliver those votes, is in
the midst of a partisan fight.
The postal service was created by the
Second Continental Congress in 1775, and
though it has a public-service mandate—to
deliver mail to the whole country—it re-
ceives no public funding. In recent years it
has consistently lost money, because
Americans have been sending less first-
class mail, among other things. Louis De-
Joy, who ran a large logistics firm, was
brought in as the postmaster-general in
May with a mandate to fix its finances by
finding savings.
Yet Mr DeJoy is also a prominent Repub-
lican donor. In 2017 he was one of three na-
tional finance chairmen of the Republican
National Convention, along with Michael
Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer
(who is now in jail), and Elliott Broidy, an
investor. This alarms Democrats, who spy a
scheme by the president to steal an elec-
tion he would otherwise lose.
Mr Trump opposes voting by mail be-
cause he thinks it is bad for Republicans.
Mr DeJoy’s reorganisation has sloweddown mail delivery in a way that therefore
seems to accord with the president’s re-
election strategy. Panicked voters have
been snapping and posting pictures of the
famous blue mailboxes, some of which
have been carted off as part of the efficiency
drive. The postal service’s board of gover-
nors, composed of both Republican and
Democratic appointees, proposed a $25bn
(0.1% of gdp) public subsidy, which House
Democrats have taken up. Mr Trump is not
keen. “If we don’t make a deal,” he told Fox
News, “that means they don’t get the mon-
ey. That means they can’t have universal
mail-in voting, they just can’t have it.”
The postal service’s capacity has been
particularly reduced in cities in swing
states such as Pontiac, Michigan; Philadel-
phia, Pennsylvania; Columbus, Ohio; and
even in Houston, Texas. The uspswarned
46 states that mailed-in ballots could arrive
too late to be counted. Mr DeJoy then said
that changes to the postal service would be
postponed to avoid disrupting the election.
Is that the end of the saga? Not quite.
Even if the uspsis functioning as normal,
an increase in voting by mail could still
have a significant effect on the result. In
New York’s primary in July, staffing short-
falls combined with a surge in postal vot-
ing meant thousands of ballots were not
sent out on time, and many others were
discarded for minor technical errors. Ac-
cording to election officials, one out of ev-The presidential election
The postmaster always rings twice
WASHINGTON, DC
Even if the postal service functions as normal, more mail-in voting doubles the
chances of recounts in close states
United States
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25 Veteransinpolitics
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28 Lexington: UnconventionalAlso in this section