Former US president Barack Obama said that US President Donald Trump is trying to “actively kneecap the Postal Service” to hurt vote-by-mail in November’s US presidential election.
In an interview with his former adviser David Plouffe, Obama pointed to Trump’s remarks linking his opposition to US$25 billion in emergency US Postal Service (USPS) funding to his fears about mail-in ballots.
“What we’ve never seen before is a president say: ‘I’m going to try to actively kneecap the postal service to encourage voting, and I will be explicit about the reason I’m doing it.’ That’s sort of unheard of, right?” Obama told Plouffe on Cadence13’s Campaign HQ podcast.
The vast majority of states are set to allow mail-in voting in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
On Friday, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said he would order the election to be conducted mostly through the mail.
Obama, who has only spoken out rarely about Trump’s actions in office, urged voters and elected officials to take steps to “protect the integrity” of the election.
Trump has repeatedly made unfounded claims that mail-in voting is rife with fraud and hurts Republican candidates, but his opposition has not stopped most states from expanding their vote-by-mail options for the coming election.
On Thursday, Trump said that not approving a financial lifeline sought by Democrats would mean that “you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.”
The postal service has sent letters to 46 states and the District of Columbia warning that mail-in ballots might not arrive in time to be counted.
In a letter to Pennsylvania’s secretary of state disclosed on Thursday, the general counsel for the postal service said the state’s deadline for requesting to vote-by-mail does not give it enough time to deliver and return a ballot in time to be counted.
The letter said voters and elected officials should give at least seven days’ leeway for a ballot to go through the mail, but state law allows voters to apply to vote by mail by 5pm the Tuesday before Election Day, leaving just six days.
By that standard, more than 20 other states that allow mail-in ballot requests in the days just before the election would not leave enough time for even a one-way mailing, according to state laws compiled by the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said her state was prepared to handle the election.
She said ballots were sent out three weeks in advance, and voters could either put them in drop boxes or leave them at voting centers.
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