Will You Vote By Mail?

Here’s the opening excerpt from my article I published on Saturday about how Trump is attempting to destroy the US Postal Service from the inside-out:

Newly appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has recently distributed a memo describing a substantial restructuring that implements a hierarchal chart within the United States Postal Service, that many are referring to as a “Friday Night Massacre.” The new system effectively removes two high-up executives overseeing day-to-day operations and displaces 23 top postal executives. The reorganization memo was released Friday and a copy of it was reviewed by The Washington Post.

You can read the entire article here. You can also read the first article in this series Destroy the Post Office, Steal an Election, here.

I have also had a postal employee reach out to me with the information being disseminated on Saturday via employee mailboxes that attempts to explain the justifications for the recent structural changes. The notice talks about DeJoy in the third person in a fairly lengthy two-page memo to employees that reads more like a press release of propaganda rather than a reassuring note from a trusted leader. The memo claims that DeJoy’s intention is to “change and improve the postal service to better serve the American public.” The notice also goes on to defend DeJoy’s relationship with Donald Trump — here is an excerpt:

“ The Postmaster General also took the opportunity to clear up misconceptions that have been raised in the media and social media:

'First, while I certainly have a good relationship with the [P]resident of the United States, the notion that I would ever make decisions concerning the postal service at the direction of the president, or anyone else in the administration, is wholly off base,’ said DeJoy.

Why has this memo, written in the third-person, been given to postal employees like this? Why didn’t DeJoy write something directly to all of the people who work for him? Who really put this memo together and why does it read so obviously like propaganda? It’s clear from this document that the Postmaster General just expects postal workers to fall in line without any reasonable discourse on what is actually happening, but I don’t think many of them are buying it.

My question for you is: are you in a state that will offer the vote by mail option and if so, are you planning to vote by mail? There has been no real evidence yet that letter delivery is at risk, although I don’t know why we wouldn’t expect something down the road from DeJoy to change all of that. Has your confidence in the US Postal Service changed or are you more resolved to help fight the actions of the Trump Administration that appear to be dismantling the reliable agency piece by piece?

I stand with the Post Office, but can we trust DeJoy with our votes in the biggest election of our lives? Will you vote by mail?

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Amee Vanderpool writes the SHERO Newsletter and is an attorney, published author, contributor to newspapers and magazines and analyst for BBC radio. She can be reached at avanderpool@gmail.com or follow her on Twitter @girlsreallyrule.

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