Louis DeJoy: Trump’s controversial postmaster general who holds a key to the November election

Even if you don’t recognise the name, Louis DeJoy sounds like he should be in residency in a Las Vegas nightclub rather than helming the United States Postal Service (USPS) through, arguably, its darkest days. Yet this is the Trump reality; a starlight lounge presidency where megadonors croon their way into positions where they become mega-partisan players in the story that is set to dominate the 2020 election. In this, DeJoy, a major Team Trump fundraiser, is typical of this administration.

That might sound like a huge claim in the year of COVID-19 yet without COVID this story couldn’t happen. DeJoy is the Postmaster General of the USPS and how his actions might affect postal ballots is also a story of the pandemic. Without the pandemic, there wouldn’t be a rise in the number of voters wanting to vote by mail. Nor would Donald Trump – himself a regular absentee voter – be objecting to the use of mail-in votes.

“Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country because they are cheaters,” he claims. Yet the row around “mail ballots” begins with some deliberate confusion. The act of voting by mail is referred to in so many different ways that it makes it seem that a “mail-in ballot” is somehow different from an “absentee ballot”. That really isn’t the case.

A “mail-in” generally refers to any system where voting is routinely done through the mail. The key word is “routinely”. States such as Colorado, Utah, and Hawaii already use a system of mail-in ballots. They have what’s called an “all-mail” voting system.

“Absentee” means practically the same but the process is more involved. In 33 states, people can cast an absentee vote but only in nine states do voters automatically get sent a form to apply for an absentee ballot. In the other 24 states, it’s left to the voter to apply. In some of these states, you might or might not need a reason for the absentee ballot and fear of the coronavirus is a legitimate reason to acquire one. In the remaining states, such as New York, you need a reason other than the pandemic to get an absentee ballot, meaning that most voters will still have to attend a polling station in November.

All of which brings us to Mr DeJoy…

DeJoy holds the position once occupied by Benjamin Franklin, the man credited with establishing the modern US postal service. It was the first Postmaster General who helped define America’s sense of itself through home delivery, the penny post, and even regular milestones erected on post roads to help the riders maintain their pace. DeJoy is hardly in Franklin’s mould.

For a long time, the USPS has been trapped between competing political ideologies. To some, it’s an essential service whose value cannot be measured in profitability. To others, it’s a government-subsidized business that needs to learn to live in the real world. Trump’s arrival made the latter position even more acute. Initially, the new president’s anger seemed to be directed towards USPS’s deal with Amazon, a company owned by Trump’s nemesis, Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post. When the President appointed loyalist DeJoy back in May, the move was seen in those terms. Only, Coronavirus changed all that. More people began to express their intention to vote by mail and DeJoy suddenly found himself holding a key to the November election.

Undoubtedly, structural changes were already going on before the current controversy. Back in July, DeJoy instigated new changes that the Post Office claimed were essential to ensure “we will be financially stable.” Overtime was scrapped and mail began to backlog. Suddenly there were stories of Delivery Barcode Sorters being scrapped and photographs emerged of wagons loaded with mailboxes removed from city streets.

It’s as yet unclear as to how much of this was the normal internal workings of USPS (some documents suggest that the machines were due to be retired and the mailboxes were being rotated to “higher-volume areas”), but the timing was curious. It came as Trump stepped up his rhetoric and on Fox Business Network, Trump admitted what he was doing. Blaming the Democrats’ unwillingness to pass a relief package (a claim itself enmeshed in Washington politics), he said: “We don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money […] That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting; they just can’t have it.”

It’s a ploy as cunning as it is shady. If you knew nothing about US elections, you would think that Trump and the Republicans are arguing on the side of the angels when it comes to fair elections. The reality is that their claims are not supported by the facts. Newt Gingrich, writing for Newsweek, recently declared that: “voter fraud is real. Democrats, the media and the so-called public interest groups on the political Left will tell you otherwise, but they are either lying or totally ignorant.” For evidence, he directs readers to The Heritage Foundation’s online database, where he says you can find the evidence.

And he’s right. You can find evidence… of all 1290 “proven instances” over decades of data. To put that into context, 115 million votes were cast in the 2018 midterms. The Heritage database lists 65 instances of election fraud for that year, which if you like your zeros is 0.00000087% of the total vote (other studies suggest overall fraud could be as high as “0.00009%”!)

That is the key point in all of this. Election fraud is the US is a statistical irrelevance if you’re talking about voters committing the fraud. Even then, mail voting leaves a paper trail that can be checked. If anything, it’s even safer than the electronic ballots where machines could be hacked. Rather, an even greater problem singularly not addressed by the President’s sudden zeal for fair elections is the systemic corruption of ballots over decades. Indeed, to understand Trump’s tactics, you have to understand America’s history of voter suppression.

In any normal year, a feature of US elections is the gamesmanship that takes place around demographics. Not only is gerrymandering commonplace – the strategic redrawing of district boundaries to advantage one party – there is also deliberate interference in the process of voting. The most egregious example, perhaps, occurred in 2018, when Brian Kemp, the Republican Secretary of State in Georgia, invoked an “exact-match” law to discount 53,000 voters because of discrepancies with their voter registration, often as minor as a typo or missing hyphen in their name. Perhaps it wouldn’t have looked so bad had he not interfered in an election where he was running and would end up the winning candidate (with a margin of 54,723 votes).

The example is hardly isolated. Long queues are commonplace in nearly every national election, as is the shortage of voting machines. In Kansas in 2018, the last polling station in Dodge City was moved outside the city limits and over a mile from the nearest bus stop, disadvantaging poorer voters in a predominately Hispanic city. Texas (currently a close race between Trump and Biden) has already closed down 750 polling stations since 2012.

What we are now witnessing is a continuation of that strategy but on a national scale. It allows Trump to question the legitimacy of the ballot should he lose but also mire postal voting in controversy, therefore limiting its use. Lastly, if he can reduce the efficiency of the postal service, he might ensure that some votes will arrive too late to be counted. Given that Democrats tend to come from more populated urban areas, are less sceptical of COVID-19, and have already expressed a greater intent to use mail-in voting, any problem with the postal system will inherently benefit the Republicans.

Clever, sly, conniving, duplicitous, wrong, or downright criminal? Pick your adjective and take your corner. If 2020 is going to have one last twist in store, it might well begin inside the US Post Office.