The left’s false narrative on the post office

Here’s the difference: Where President Trump’s wacky theories about stolen elections are immediately dismissed, and then tirelessly repeated, by the mainstream press, laughable Democrat conspiracy theories are considered serious news even after they have been debunked.

And so Democrats and their bylined operatives continue to suggest that the 2016 election was gravely tainted by Russian interference whose impact is hard to measure beyond some ads on social media and emails it might have stolen that embarrassed Hillary Clinton. From Joe Biden on down, they push the fiction that Stacey Abrams lost Georgia’s governor’s race in 2018 due to voter suppression. And they are irresponsibly taking Trump’s musings about accepting the election results and ratcheting it into a constitutional crisis that has little to no chance of actually happening.

Fool me once, twice, even thrice doesn’t seem to apply as these forces shamelessly push their latest conspiracy theory that Trump plans to steal the election by hobbling the post office.

Most conspiracy theories are like a poison pearl; the sandy grain of truth in this one is that the post office has been removing some mail boxes and letter sorting machines. This has been happening for decades. Between 2000 and 2015 it eliminated almost 60% of its collection boxes because people weren’t using them in the age of email. The more recent decommissioning of boxes and machines at the center of today’s conspiracy theory was started by the postmaster general appointed during the Obama administration as part of a larger push to stanch the flow of red ink.

Trump added fuel to the conspiracy theory earlier this month by claiming he would block money the Post Office needs “to do universal mail-in voting.”

This assertion was contradicted by Louis DeJoy, the North Carolina Republican named Postmaster General in June. DeJoy – who was appointed not by Trump but the independent agency’s board of governors – told Congress the post office has the resources to handle the expected surge in mail-in ballots.

The truth of DeJoy’s statement is supported by a basic fact: the post office processes as many as 500 million pieces of mail per day. The idea that the long planned removal of a few sorting machines will suddenly render it incapable of handling even a hundred million ballots sent out and returned over several weeks is absurd.

The mainstream press has reported all this. But that only makes its refusal to call out Democrats even worse. They know and they don’t care.

Just last week North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein and five other Democratic officials misused their office to launch a partisan lawsuit against the Postal Service last week, claiming the agency’s “unlawful actions” will undermine the “ability to vote by mail and conduct free and fair elections.”

Stein’s press release announcing the suit provides no evidence to support this claim. Stein also received no pushback from the press.

There is, of course, good reason to be concerned about the post office’s key role in the upcoming election. Many ballots during recent primaries were thrown out because they were delivered late or lost. But this has far more to do with the post office’s legendary inefficiency than any secret plan to hobble the troubled agency.

The silver lining of this fake conspiracy theory is that it is spotlighting the challenges faced by a pillar of American life whose role and business model has been disrupted by social media, direct deposit and Fed Ex. About 58% of the mail it now delivers is advertising – i.e. junk mail.

The dark cloud is that should Trump win, it will provide Democrats with another false narrative about why they lost.

Contributing columnist J. Peder Zane can be reached at jpederzane@jpederzane.com.