Armed guards have been deployed to US Postal Service facilities as the Trump administration intensifies its campaign against mail-in voting ahead of the November midterm elections, per Raw Story’s confirmed investigative reporting today, in a development that election law experts are describing as the most aggressive federal pressure on voting infrastructure since the Voting Rights Act’s passage.
The deployment follows Trump’s statement at his Michigan rally Tuesday that mail-in ballots are “inherently corrupt” and his claim that the United States is “the only country in the world” that uses them, which is false on both counts. Mail-in voting is legal in all 50 states. Dozens of countries use absentee and postal voting. What Trump is describing as inherent corruption is a voting method that approximately 46 percent of Americans used in the 2020 election, which is the election Trump says was stolen from him via exactly the method he is now deploying armed guards to surveil.
The USPS is an independent federal agency whose employees are postal workers. They sort mail. They deliver packages. They process absentee ballots during election cycles, which is a function the Postal Service has performed for over a century without armed security at its processing facilities. The armed guards represent a change in posture that postal worker unions have described as intimidation and that the administration has described as election security, which are two descriptions of the same thing from two different vantage points.
The November midterms are the elections in which Republicans are defending their House majority with a margin of three seats, which means three flipped districts end Republican control of the chamber. Mail-in ballots have historically skewed toward Democratic voters, which is the arithmetic that makes the administration’s position on mail-in voting something other than a neutral election security measure.
The guards are at the post offices. The midterms are in November. The ballots have not been cast yet.
When armed guards appear at postal facilities three months before an election where the president has declared the voting method those facilities process to be inherently corrupt, what exactly is being protected?
Sources
Raw Story: Armed guards descend on USPS as Trump’s war on mail-in voting ratchets up
