This is an adapted excerpt from the Aug. 29 episode of “Connect with Jacob Soboroff.”
It’s been so hot here in Los Angeles, with temperatures hitting above 100 degrees in recent days, that the postal carrier who delivers my mail has been showing up in a giant straw hard-shell shade hat. And this week, when I saw that postal carrier in that giant straw shade hat, I saw someone who is on the front lines of American democracy.
When I say “history of American democracy,” do you think “postal service?” Probably not. I didn’t either. But it turns out the United States Postal Service has long played a significant role in the American experiment.
Since America’s founding, the USPS has connected the country. In 1775, a year before the Declaration of Independence was signed, the Continental Congress appointed Benjamin Franklin as the nation’s first postmaster general. His job was to build a new postal system for the colonies. The purpose was to give the government a secure, reliable way to communicate with the public during a time of rapid change, which would soon give rise to American democracy.
Our forefathers believed a new nation could not govern itself or stay united without a dependable way to share information and stay informed. In other words, the postal system wasn’t just about delivering letters — it was about connecting people, spreading ideas and helping hold a new nation together.
There’s nothing inherently political about America’s postal service. But that hasn’t stopped politicians from attempting to manipulate it to fit their political needs.
And it’s done so for centuries: from the first delivery of newspapers to the mailing of campaign literature and pamphlets; to facilitating absentee voting during the Civil War, when Union and Confederate states set up mail-in voting systems for soldiers on the battlefield; to securely moving billions of ballots in recent years.
Today, eight states and the District of Columbia conduct elections entirely by mail, and they rely on the USPS to make sure ballots reach every eligible voter on time.
The USPS has quietly been one of America’s unsung heroes. No matter where you live, the Postal Service makes sure you can send and receive mail. That’s because of its universal service obligation. Unlike FedEx, UPS or DHS, the USPS is required by law to deliver to every address in the country, including rural and hard-to-reach places most private companies skip.
For example, to reach a remote village at the bottom of the Grand Canyon in Arizona, the USPS still uses “mail-by-mule,” where a train of up to 22 mules — and sometimes horses — makes an eight-hour round trip into the canyon to deliver parcels six days a week.
There’s nothing inherently political about America’s postal service. But that hasn’t stopped politicians from attempting to manipulate it to fit their political needs — and history shows why that matters.
Like when Southern slaveholders and then-President Andrew Jackson used the post office to block abolitionist literature from being delivered in the South. Or during World War I when then-President Woodrow Wilson used the postal system as part of a broader campaign of wartime censorship and surveillance.
In the 1970s, when then-President Richard Nixon became so frustrated by a postal worker strike that crippled U.S. communications, he declared a national emergency. He deployed more than 24,000 U.S. service members and National Guards to New York City post offices to sort and deliver the mail by hand.
Those were different eras, with different political players and different political battles, but the underlying reality was the same: The Postal Service is part of the infrastructure through which Americans communicate, organize and participate in civic life.
Now, that infrastructure is at the center of Donald Trump’s effort to control who votes and how.
Last week, the president’s effort to restrict mail-in voting bounced between the courts, producing whiplash for voters and election officials. It started back in March, when Trump signed an executive order aimed at creating a nationwide list of verified eligible voters and putting new restrictions on mail-in voting.
The order also urged states to provide the Postal Service with their lists of voters eligible to cast ballots by mail. The Postal Service agreed to comply with the executive order and said it would not deliver mail ballots in states that do not share their voter data, only delivering ballots that meet certain criteria.
But a legal battle soon erupted. A group of Democratic state attorneys general sued, arguing that only Congress and the states had the power to set rules for elections, not the executive branch.
Last week, the Supreme Court ruled the lawsuit was premature and cleared the way for Trump to pursue his restrictions on mail ballots. But more legal challenges ensued, and by late Thursday night, a federal judge had again blocked a key provision of Trump’s plan to restrict mail-in voting until at least Sept. 10.
In the judge’s 11-page ruling, she dismissed the administration’s narrative that there’s widespread fraudulent mail-in voting, writing, “The USPS’s interest in correcting an unsubstantiated problem through likely unconstitutional means is dwarfed by the overwhelming risk of pervasive disenfranchisement of citizens who need access to mail ballots in order to vote.”
But of course, that wasn’t the end of this saga. The Trump administration has now appealed that ruling.
The midterm elections are just over 60 days away. My mail carrier in the giant straw shade hat will be delivering my ballot in about a month, and the first mail-in ballots are set to be sent out this week in North Carolina. The director of elections for Wake County, the largest county in North Carolina, told MS NOW they have “no other guidance other than to move forward with beginning to mail out absentees on September 4.”
With two months until the midterms, the president has thrown a wrench into the election process. And now officials across the country are being forced to prepare for an election even as the rules governing part of that process remain in legal limbo.
Allison Detzel contributed.
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