Practical
postal
knowledge,
sensibly
organized.

You can assure your friends and family that voting by mail is safe – for now. You probably heard that an Executive Order – from the President of the United States – would have turned USPS into part of an unprecedented federal government grab for control of mail ballot voting lists – which are supposed to be controlled by the states. Under this plan, if you were not on a list of voters approved by the federal government, USPS would not deliver your ballot to you. Experts say that would have been unconstitutional.

The Executive Order was argued over in courts until finally the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was too close to the November midterm elections to implement it. So the plan is dead for now, but who knows if it won’t be revived for the 2028 election?

One of the key parts of that plan would have been for ballot envelopes to be printed with a barcode unique to each voter it was addressed to. But in a strange twist, as revealed by a postal whistleblower, if a single envelope had a printing error, that whole batch of envelopes would not be mailed to an entire group of voters. Don’t ask me to explain that, but clearly it would cause problems for mail-in ballots, as the insider revealed that a hastily assembled, untested plan was supposed to be quickly rolled out. So it is fortunate that this will not be used in 2026.

One consequence of the Postal Service being dragged into this scheme, has been a loss of trust in mail-in voting. Here in Washington, public officials have been advising voters to drop their ballots off into special drop boxes – INSTEAD of dropping them in mailboxes. This means less revenue for the Postal Service, and further undermines the USPS’ reputation and trust. In other states where mail-in ballots are optional, there has been a reduced number of requests.

Where is Postal Leadership?

The USPS’ governing body is the Postal Board of Governors. They have put up no resistance to the attempt to turn the Postal Service into a component of an apparent plan to either manipulate voting lists, undermine mail balloting, or to do both. When asked to begin a plan to prevent delivery of mail ballots to voters who were not part of the federal government’s “approved” list, they appeared to offer no objections, but begin to try to design that plan.

Anton Hajjar, former lawyer for the APWU and former lawyer for the Postal Board of Governors, has explained that the Postal Service is not under the Executive Branch of government and by law is not under direct control of the President. It had been under the President prior to 1970, when the Post Office Department was changed by law into the U.S. Postal Service, an independent branch of the federal government, subject to laws passed by the Congress.

The President has the power to appoint the Postal Board of Governors, but such appointments must be approved by Congress. It’s not clear whether the President can remove them. My guess is that the members of the Board, as a group, were afraid that they would be removed if they didn’t follow the Executive Order that some fear would be used to gain election advantage.

The APWU is asking its members, and the public, to sign an online petition to the Postal Board of Governors. You can got to APWU.ORG and you will see at the top of that web page “The Supreme Court blocked the Vote-by-Mail rule changes for the 2026 elections. Now the USPS needs to permanently rescind this attack on democracy! Click to send them a letter now!”

Please click on that link on the APWU website (https://usmailnotforsale.org/take-action/) to sign the petition, which already has 27,000 signatures, and feel free to send that link to co-workers and friends and family.

On November 10, the Postal Board of Governors is having their annual public meeting where public comments will be allowed. A number of postal union members and activists, including myself, are planning to be there, to urge them to do the right thing.

I think that history will judge harshly those members of postal leadership who caved in and went along with what appeared to be an unconstitutional scheme to turn the Postal Service into a political instrument. Our job, as part of our postal union, is to oppose any such effort, and to do what we can to preserve public trust in a vital public service. We may not trust our bosses, nationally or even locally, but we want the Postal Service to succeed and to continue to provide jobs with decent pay and benefits.