Erick-Woods Erickson
I voted in person for the primary this year. I voted in the Democrat primary. The Republican races were not contested in my area, but far left activists were coming for the local sheriff in my county. As still happens in parts of the country, the general election is won in a partisan primary. Thankfully, the sheriff won re-election.
I voted in person because my absentee ballot never showed up. It seems like they never actually got my absentee ballot application to process. Normally, I’d get a text message telling me they got the application. I never got it and it seems it never processed.
On Saturday, some friends who live ten miles from us received my daughter’s graduation announcement. The postmark was April 16th. This has been a recurring theme. All the graduation announcements were mailed on April 16th.
Not a single announcement arrived in anyone’s mailbox before graduation day on May 16, 2024, exactly a month later. My sisters both got theirs the weekend after graduation. Several friends had their feelings hurt thinking they were not invited to graduation. Then they got the announcements. A friend who lives a mile away got his announcement at the beginning of June.
This is not just my family’s story. Lots of people in the Southeast are having this problem. As I understand it, the postal service consolidated regional mail sorting to a facility south of Atlanta to save money in Palmetto, GA. It has been an unmitigated disaster. Some mail is having to be sent to other sorting facilities across the country and back. When noting this on Twitter, many people replied noting that their local mail, from locals in Georgia, had Michigan post marks. I have had several people tell me the Palmetto mail sorting facility is such a disaster that mail is being rerouted to both Arizona and Michigan for sorting and then returned. See, for example, the track of this package that bounced all over the postal sorting system.
Another problem is apparently the post office now prioritizes Amazon packages over first class mail. In fact, Amazon deliveries are the only pieces of mail that routinely show up on time. Bills, payments, ballots, etc. are all delayed in favor of the post office doing Amazon’s bidding. Again, taking on Amazon’s high volume of shipping was a way for the post office to make money. But it has caused local post offices to prioritize packages over first class mail.
The Board of Elections in Rome, Georgia had to send public advisories before the Georgia primaries that, despite sending ballots in a timely manner, people were not getting them and needed to be prepared to vote on Election Day.
If you haven’t figured out where this is going, Georgia and North Carolina are both considered swing states. Both the Democrats and Republicans intend to push people to do early voting and absentee voting. Nobody, on a bipartisan basis, is getting mail in a timely manner in the Southeast.
Ironically, the Post Master General Louis DeJoy is a Trump appointee and Democrats made him out to be a Trump villain. Democrats in Congress have turned sympathetic to DeJoy as he helped them navigate funding issues through the House of Representatives. But a Time profile noting the Democrats’ shifting views of DeJoy includes his efforts to streamline operations in Georgia. It just isn’t working well and Democrats are back to blaming DeJoy.
Senator Jon Ossoff, expected to face Georgia Governor Brian Kemp in 2026, is making the post office a big issue with constituent services. He has been trying to get answers and hitting brick walls. In a statement released to the public, Ossoff says, “Postmaster General DeJoy’s refusal to cooperate with basic Senate oversight is baffling and disturbing. It suggests that in addition to being incompetent at delivering the mail on time, he doesn’t care about the Georgians in distress as a result of his incompetence. Prescriptions aren’t arriving. Bills aren’t getting paid. Ballots aren’t getting counted. I will continue fighting for the Georgians suffering from the Postmaster General’s failure.”
Ossoff is right about the prescriptions, bills, and ballots. Last week, the blood thinner I’m on never showed up at my local pharmacy. I’ll give you one guess why.
A friend received a letter from the IRS a few weeks ago. He had failed to pay his taxes. He actually sent his check in March. It had not been deposited by the time the IRS sent him a notice of failure to pay. The matter has since been resolved.
Another friend is the CFO of a company north of Atlanta. His company had to lay off employees in April because their revenue was down. Customers simply were not paying in a timely manner. They are still, here at the end of June, getting checks that were postmarked in January and February. Customers, it turns out, were paying. The postal service just wasn’t delivering.
This is not Democrats targeting Republicans. This is happening to everyone. It is a foreseeable problem in the Southeast for the general election. There is time to fix the problem, but that time is slipping.
This is going to end badly for all of us when the “stolen election” claims start up the day after the election.
