Mail-In Voting

I happen to be a United States Postal Service employee and have been since 1987...I'm in the clerk craft section of operations and have always been involved in mail processing .  I don't intend with this article to get into its recent policies under the direction of new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, but I realize that with the current heated debates going on nationwide about expanded mail-in voting due to the COVID-19 epidemic screwing around with all our lives, I may have to refer to the USPS a little in passing...but it's not the gist of what I want to write about today.  No, I want instead to address the different perspectives that people on different political sides have about the process of voting and how this has influenced their views on today's questions...

Regrettably, in the United States...especially in the Jim Crow Deep South states...there is a history of voter suppression of different demographic groups, especially of blacks, intended to keep them out political power and in an underclass state.  After the Voting Rights Act was enacted in 1965, the measures taken to disenfranchise certain prospective voters...such as poll taxes and literacy tests...have been outlawed...but there is still a sense nowadays that one side of the political equation wants to reduce the presence of blacks, who tend to overwhelmingly vote Democratic, at the voting booth.  So you see the accusations flying whenever Republican state legislators and governors sign into law new voter identification bills that reputedly are designed to protect the electoral process from voter fraud but are seen by the other side as discriminatory and an end-around to the Voting Rights Act.  Also, Trump's objections to the universal mail-in voting proposed in light of the coronavirus pandemic have been portrayed as voter suppression as well...he alleges there would be mass fraud with ballots flooding the mail system, many unasked for.  The President has stated that voting is an act that should involve an effort on the part of the voter...and in this I am in agreement with him.  To me, the more passive a voter is come election day the more able his or her vote can be manipulated by outside parties, thereby distorting the will of the people.  An example is this notion of ballot harvesting, illegal in most states but not in California.  In the 2018 congressional election held in that state there were a number of House seats that looked to be close Republican victories but after the "harvested" votes...overwhelming Democratic...were counted, they went to the other side.  Democratic Party operatives basically canvassed neighborhoods, avoiding registered Republican homes and going to those supporting their own party and collecting and delivering mail-in ballots to the elections offices.  Now the parties have always had their election day voting drives whereby they encourage voters and sometimes even drive them to the polling place and back...but you see, this still entails some sort of active effort on the part of the voter...

So in this discussion we're left with two seemingly conflicting philosophical approaches.  One side says voting should be as easily, effortlessly accessible as possible and the other says that it is an act of responsibility that necessarily involves initiative on the part of the voter.  As in most things there should be a reasonable middle ground...I think too passive of a voting electorate can tempt a destructive manipulation of the system while the rules for voting should be made careful to avoid making them too difficult for citizens in diverse groups to attain.  I like my Florida system of mail-in absentee voting whereby I take the active step and request a ballot either online or by phone or mail.  In California, on the other hand, they have flooded their state with ballots while in Texas one has to meet special criteria to vote absentee...even in the midst of this pandemic.  Only nine states currently have universal vote-by-mail, but the Democrats in Washington want to nationalize this process with legislation that is being opposed by Trump and the Republicans...and this is sadly the convenient reason they're making such a big fuss about the Postal Service right now, not because they care all that much about the institution in itself. As I've said before, back in 2009-10 the Democrats had control over the Presidency and both houses of Congress and did nothing to help it with its financial troubles, part of which are caused by the shrinking first class mail volume brought on by the digital revolution and part of which are caused by a burdensome, massive (and unique) 75-year pre-retirement funding mandate passed and signed by the Republicans in 2006...