First The Mailboxes, Now Postal Workers

The efforts by Trumpist lackey and straw voter crook Postmaster General Louis "Delay" DeJoy to hamstring vote by mail / absentee balloting this fall to benefit career con man and cheater Donald "COVID Donnie" Trump are well documented. From removing post boxes from thousands of neighborhoods, to dismantling rapid mail sorting equipment to slow the sorting and delivery of ballots, DeJoy has done Dear Leader's bidding to rig the election. 

Beyond removing equipment, new reporting indicates that the postal workers themselves have been denied COVID testing and temperature checks while they work in overwhelming, stressful conditions to keep the mail flowing. The result was predictable:

"In recent weeks, furors over Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s cost-cutting initiatives, and over President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated warnings of voter fraud, have overshadowed a significant threat to the Postal Service’s ability to handle the expected tens of millions of mail-in ballots this fall: a rapid rise in the number of workers sidelined by COVID-19.

The total number of postal workers testing positive has more than tripled from about 3,100 cases in June to 9,600 in September, and at least 83 postal workers have died from complications of COVID-19, according to USPS. Moreover, internal USPS data shows that about 52,700 of the agency’s 630,000 employees, or more than 8%, have taken time off at some point during the pandemic because they were sick, or had to quarantine or care for family members." (our emphasis)

 Contact tracing should have given the workers some protection and idea about when they needed to quarantine, but the Postal Service leadership has curbed that, too:

"Alongside other administrative duties, they are supposed to register COVID-19 cases and interview workers when they get sick. In the New York district, one nurse has been responsible for contact tracing for about 8,200 employees; in Detroit, the ratio is two nurses per 11,600 workers; and in Atlanta, one for 12,500. Facilities in all three districts have seen coronavirus outbreaks. USPS has reemployed 10 former agency nurses to assist with contact tracing, according to a spokesperson.

'To use the word contact tracing is a joke,' said Jonathan Smith, president of the New York metro area’s postal worker union." (our emphasis)

Yesterday, Federal District Court Judge Stanley Bastian issued an order temporarily blocking DeJoy's "operational changes," saying, 

“The states have demonstrated that the defendants are involved in a politically motivated attack on the efficiency of the Postal Service. They have also demonstrated that this attack on the Postal Service is likely to irreparably harm the states’ ability to administer the 2020 general election.” (our emphasis)

Trump knows the key to his theft of the election is to take down mail in voting, which a significant number of Dems plan to use. The undermining of the Postal Service is his primary way to achieve that, disenfranchising millions of Americans, as Judge Bastian observed.