Each day, when Nick Casselli, the president of a Philadelphia postal workers union, sits down at his desk on Main Street in this historic town where trolley cars still run and the post office is a source of civic pride, his phone is full of alarmed messages about increasing delays in mail delivery.
Casselli and his 1,600 members have been in a state of high alert since Louis DeJoy, a Republican megadonor and an ally of President Trump, took over as postmaster general in May.
Overtime was eliminated, prompting backups.
Seven mail-sorting machines were removed from a nearby processing center in West Philadelphia, causing further delays.
Now, post offices are being told to open later and close during lunch.
“I have some customers banging on my people’s doors: ‘Open up!’” Casselli said. “I’ve never seen that in my whole 35-year postal career.”
Similar accounts of slowdowns and curtailed service are emerging across the country as DeJoy pushes cost-cutting measures he says are intended to overhaul an agency suffering billion-dollar losses.
But as Trump rails almost daily against the service and delays clog the mail, voters and postal workers warn a crisis is building that could disenfranchise record numbers of Americans who will be casting ballots by mail in November because of the coronavirus.
For the most part, experts and employees say, the Postal Service is still capable of operating as usual.
Yet the agency has warned states that it may not be able to meet their deadlines for delivering last-minute ballots.
And earlier this week Trump said he opposes new postal funding because of his opposition to mail-in voting, which he complains will benefit Democrats and claims without evidence is riddled with fraud.
At risk are not just the ballots — and medical prescriptions and paychecks — of residents around the country, but also the reputation of the Postal Service as the most popular and perhaps the least politicized part of the federal government.
Trump’s position on the USPS could be “the most politically boneheaded move” he’s made, RealClearPolitics associate editor A.B. Stoddard said today on Fox News.
“The president’s been bashing the post office for months, calling it a joke, calling it a mess, saying they can’t handle what’s coming. He’s asked the post office to quadruple their prices. He’s vetoed, made many, many statements about the post office and how incapable he believes it is, as he has rejected new funding for the post office and threatened to veto more COVID relief that includes rescue funds for the post office,” Stoddard said. “He’s made it very clear what he thinks of the post office.”
Philadelphia, a heavily Democratic city in a critical swing state, is a vivid example of how alarmed people have become.
Representative Brendan Boyle said his office had received 345 complaints about the Postal Service last month — compared to just 17 in July 2019.
Elected officials in several states say they have been flooded by worried calls and emails.
Victoria Brownworth, a freelance journalist in Philadelphia, is among the residents worried about whether her ballot will be counted — and, in her case, also worried about much more.
For Brownworth, who was paralyzed four years ago, the mail is her lifeline, delivering prescriptions and checks and mail-in ballots to her Philadelphia home.
But that lifeline has snapped.
She said she has received mail just twice in the past three weeks, and she dreads November’s election, worried that her ballot will suffer the same fate as the oxygen tube that she ordered three weeks ago — and has still not arrived.
“It’s just terrifying,” Brownworth said. “Every day I ask my wife, did we get any mail? She says no.”
DeJoy, the postmaster general, told the Postal Service’s board of governors last week that there would be no slowdown of mail ballots and promised to deliver votes “securely and on time.”
Still, interviews with mail customers, election officials and postal workers in six battleground states show that mail delays — and 2020 worries — are widespread.
In Ohio, where mail voting is likely to double, piles of undelivered mail are sitting in a Cleveland distribution facility.
In rural Michigan, diabetes medicine that used to arrive in three days now takes almost two weeks.
In the Milwaukee area, dozens of trailers filled with packages are left behind every day.
In New Glarus, Wis., the owners of the Maple Leaf Cheese and Chocolate Haus are worried their cheese will go bad now that deliveries that used to take two to three days are taking twice that.
“I’m definitely concerned that votes won’t be counted or that they won’t be able to handle all of the ballots that need to be processed through the post office,” said Cynthia Shumway, whose family owns the shop.
The disturbances have prompted a full-scale political war in Washington, where Trump falsely insists that mail-in voting is wracked by fraud and where billions of dollars in emergency aid that could help stem huge losses at the Postal Service are caught in a partisan drama.
Democratic lawmakers have accused the president of sabotaging the Postal Service as a means of voter suppression and have launched multiple investigations and demanded an end to delays.
On Friday, the postal services’s inspector general said she had opened an inquiry into DeJoy’s actions.
Boyle, the Philadelphia congressman, for example, said it’s no accident that mail service has become so abysmal in the key Democratic population center in Pennsylvania.
“There is no plausible way for Donald Trump or Joe Biden to get to 270 electoral votes without Pennsylvania,” he said.
While Trump’s war on the Postal Service seems aimed at Democrats, few Americans rely more on the mail than rural residents, many of them Trump voters.
As a result, there are also a number of Republicans uneasy about what’s happening with the agency, in particular three Republican senators from largely rural mail-dependent states who are facing competitive re-elections this fall: Steve Daines of Montana, Dan Sullivan of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine.
DeJoy has said he is trying to reform an organization with a “broken business model” facing a litany of billion-dollar losses and declines in mail volumes.
But voters and postal workers said the Postal Service was more than a business. To Michele Brown, 67, who lives in Morley, Mich., the post office in the rural community serves as a gathering point and source of stability, employment and a critical link to the rest of the world.
But not lately. Her 73-year-old husband, Bill, went three days without medication to treat his diabetes as the couple waited nearly two weeks for it to arrive in the mail from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“I feel like they’re playing games,” Ms. Brown said. “The mail had worked so efficiently. Letters I sent got there the next day. Now you can’t count on any of that.”
Postal workers from small-town post offices to metropolitan distribution centers say they used to operate along a simple motto: Every piece, every day, meaning that they did not leave until all of the day’s mail went out the door. No more, they say.
Postal workers say drivers are being sent out according to set schedules, whether or not all of the morning’s mail is ready for them, and delivery trucks now have strict cutoff times for when they have to be gone.
They say they are already short on staff because of quarantines and the coronavirus, and limits on working overtime are pushing them further behind.
“Mail is coming into the building faster than we can get it out,” said Mary DiMarco, who sorts bundles in a Miami postal facility. “I’m concerned about ballots being handled. That they’re not going to be processed in time.”
The stakes in this year’s election are higher than ever. While nearly a quarter of Americans voted absentee or by mail in 2016, millions more are expected to mail their ballots this year because of the coronavirus pandemic.
In Ohio, mail-in voting has been common for more than two decades, and a quarter of the state’s voters regularly cast their ballots by mail.
But some postal workers say the recent changes in work rules have dramatically slowed their ability to deliver mail, raising concerns that votes cast just several days before the election might not make it in time to be counted.
Daleo Freeman, a 26-year veteran of the Postal Service and now the president of the local American Postal Workers Union in Cleveland, described piles of mail stacking up in the regional distribution facility and in postal offices around the region.
“The decisions happened so rapidly. Now we are seeing the effect of those decisions,” Mr. Freeman said. “People are coming in every day complaining about how long it’s taking them to receive everything. ‘What the heck is going on?’”
He said further delays had occurred after five mail-sorting machines in the major Cleveland-area distribution center were dismantled in recent days.
Critics worried about political influence inside the Postal Service have focused on the removal of 671 sorting machines — about one-eighth of its devices — from facilities across the country.