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absentee ballots
'Outrageous, Unlawful Attack': Trump Plots Takeover of US Postal Service
"Any attack on the Postal Service would be part of the billionaire oligarch coup," said the president of the American Postal Workers Union.
Feb 21, 2025
President Donald Trump's reported plan to terminate every member of the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors and bring the independent and highly popular USPS under his administration's control drew immediate outrage from the world's largest postal union, which said the floated takeover would be illegal and destructive to public mail operations.
"Any attack on the Postal Service would be part of the billionaire oligarch coup, directed not just at the postal workers our union represents, but the millions of Americans who rely on the critical public service our members provide every single day," said Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), which represents hundreds of thousands of current and retired postal workers.
The union leader's statement came after The Washington Post reported Thursday that Trump is preparing to "dissolve the leadership of the U.S. Postal Service and absorb the independent mail agency into his administration, potentially throwing the 250-year-old mail provider and trillions of dollars of e-commerce transactions into turmoil."
"Trump is expected to issue an executive order as soon as this week to fire the members of the Postal Service's governing board and place the agency under the control of the Commerce Department and Secretary Howard Lutnick," the Post reported, citing unnamed sources.
Lutnick, who was confirmed by the U.S. Senate earlier this week, is a billionaire with glaring conflicts of interest.
The Post noted that Trump has spoken publicly about the possibility of privatizing the USPS, which is currently led by Louis DeJoy. On Tuesday, DeJoy—who was initially nominated for the post by Trump and has worked to gut the Postal Service from within during his tenure—asked the USPS board to begin the process of finding his successor.
The new reporting prompted warnings that Trump, who lied relentlessly about mail-in voting in the run-up to and aftermath of the 2020 election, wants to disrupt ballot deliveries by bringing the USPS under his control.
"Trump's reported outrage that the Postal Service was able to successfully deliver Americans' mail-in ballots in 2020 is exceptionally alarming when considering the same man who helped incite an insurrection based on evidence-free election denialism now wants to be in control of millions of absentee ballots," said Tony Carrk, executive director of the watchdog group Accountable.US.
"President Trump wants to consolidate power further and control access to your mail, all while making his wealthy donors richer in the process," Carrk added. "All eyes should be on conservative senators who represent rural communities who will bear the brunt of postal privatization."
trump wants to be able to tell the USPS not to deliver ballots to blue states www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...
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— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) February 20, 2025 at 9:47 PM
Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said in a statement Thursday that privatizing the USPS would be "an attack on Americans' access to critical information, benefits, and lifesaving medical care."
"It is clear that Trump and his cronies value lining their own pockets more than the lives and connection of the American public," said Connolly.
According to the Post, the USPS board was "planning to fight Trump's order" and held an "emergency meeting" Thursday at which the board "retained outside counsel and gave instructions to sue the White House if the president were to remove members of the board or attempt to alter the agency's independent status."
"Two of the group's GOP members—Derek Kan, a former Trump administration official, and Mike Duncan, a former chair of the Republican National Committee—were not in attendance," the Post reported.
Dimondstein voiced support for the postal board's plan to fight any Trump takeover attempt, saying the union backs all "efforts to defend our national treasure."
"If this reporting is true, it would be an outrageous, unlawful attack on a storied national treasure, enshrined in the Constitution and created by Congress to serve every American home and business equally," said Dimondstein. "The law created the postal board of Governors, and empowers it and it alone to hire and fire the postmaster general. Any effort by the administration to remove the board or fire postal executives is clearly illegal."
"The Postal Service is owned by the people, for the benefit of the people. Postal workers are dedicated to our mission to serve, no matter who sits in the White House or in Congress," the union leader added. "Postal workers and our unions will join with the public to fight for the vibrant, independent, and public Postal Service we all deserve."
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Rights Advocates Call on North Carolina Governor to Veto GOP's 'Anti-Voter' Bill
S.B. 747 places new restrictions on absentee voters and empowers partisan poll watchers, opening the door for voter intimidation, advocates say.
Aug 18, 2023
Voting rights advocates in North Carolina are calling on Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper to veto Senate Bill 747 following the Republican-controlled state General Assembly's passage of the legislation on Wednesday night, with the GOP moving to restrict the use of absentee ballots and take other steps that would "make it harder for people to vote rather than easier," according to one Democratic Party official.
By imposing new limits on when election officials can process absentee ballots, among other measures, the bill "is simply and basically voter suppression," Anderson Clayton, chair of the state party, told The Washington Post Thursday.
Although Republican state lawmakers joined Democrats in 2009 in unanimously supporting legislation to ensure that absentee ballots would be accepted by officials up to three days after voting ends as long as the ballots were postmarked by Election Day, the GOP pushed through new rules requiring election boards to count absentee ballots only if they are received by 7:30 pm on Election Day.
Advocates say thousands of voters may now be disenfranchised due to mail delays and that certain groups will be disproportionately affected by the new limits.
"Ending the three-day grace period would cruelly harm older voters, people with disabilities, rural voters ,and others who rely on mail-in absentee voting as a lifeline for exercising their right to vote," said Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause North Carolina, in a statement. "North Carolinians who follow well-established rules and cast their ballot on or before Election Day shouldn't have their vote thrown away because of a delay in mail delivery that's no fault of their own."
Cooper, who is expected to veto the legislation, said Republicans in the state Senate and General Assembly pushed the bill by "using the 'big lie' of election fraud" and baseless conspiracy theories that the 2020 presidential election was "rigged" in President Joe Biden's favor.
The Republican Party "wants to block voters they think won't vote Republican, legitimize conspiracy theorists to intimidate election workers, and anoint themselves to decide contested elections," said Cooper.
In addition to restricting the use of absentee ballots, S.B. 747 will require voters who use North Carolina's same-day registration system to vote using a "retrievable" ballot that can be disqualified after just one attempt to deliver a voter registration card, instead of the two attempts that are currently required before a ballot is rejected.
Voters will be permitted to challenge the registrations of anyone in their county under the new law and partisan poll watchers will be allowed to listen to conversations between voters and poll workers and take notes—opening the door to voter intimidation, rights advocates said.
"Voter intimidation is now theoretically legal inside of a polling location," Clayton told the Post.
While North Carolina has long had an "accessible election system that works well for voters throughout the state," Phillips said, "politicians in the legislature are now placing harmful burdens on voters and election administrators."
"Senate Bill 747 is filled with a number of bad ideas that undermine North Carolinians' freedom to vote," he added. "We urge Gov. Cooper to veto this unnecessary and damaging bill."
Activist Joe Katz noted that the bill was passed after the Republican Party won legislative supermajorities using district maps that disenfranchised Democratic voters and after state Rep. Tricia Cotham (R-100) changed her party affiliation from Democrat to Republican following her staunchly pro-abortion rights election campaign last year.
Cotham's decision to join the Republicans gives the party a General Assembly supermajority that could override Cooper's veto.
"North Carolina just won't quit suppressing the vote," said Leslie Proll, who heads the voting rights program at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
Changes like the ones included in S.B. 747 "do not improve the integrity of our elections," Megan Bellamy, vice president for law and policy at Voting Rights Lab, told the Post. "If anything, they erode the trust of voters."
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