An increase in the number of mail-in votes will lead to many not being counted. Additional funding has not been provided to the US Postal Service, meaning many postal votes will not arrive in time to be counted. If significant numbers of votes are not counted, the outcome could be disputed.
The argument
With millions of voters expected to cast their vote by mail in this election, the US Postal Service is coming under increasing scrutiny. It is a government agency whose board is appointed by the Republican-controlled Senate. The USPS stalled on plans to cut services until after the election citing lack of funds, but the US Congress passed a bill to provide $25bn to the USPS, which Senate leader Mitch McConnell said would not pass. There are reports from US media that 600 mail sorting machines are being decommissioned, which equates to around 10% of the service’s machines. With an estimated 80 million ballots expected to be cast by mail in the lead up to this year’s election, there are concerns regarding the USPS’s ability to cope with this increased demand, and also whether these moves are politically motivated. In normal elections not held during a global pandemic, thousands of postal votes are rejected for formalities. In the 2016 election, there were over 300,000 rejected postal ballots - if 50% of Americans vote by mail it is projected that this could result in over 1 million postal vote rejections. With so many voters voting by mail for the first time in this election, the rejection rate is likely to increase as mistakes are more likely to be made. Even if the USPS can cope with the greatly increased stress on its services as a result of the significant rise in postal voting, there remain questions around whether every vote will count. If rejection rates rise by 2%, over 2 million votes would be rejected - this is roughly the population of New Mexico. The risk of having so many votes not included in the final count could have a significant impact on state and national results - it is crucial to a democracy that every vote is counted.
Premises
Counter-arguments
The USPS has defended that it will be able to meet demand without any additional funding. USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said “the Postal Service has ample capacity to deliver all election mail securely and on-time in accordance with our delivery standards, and we will do so”. Trump has also suggested that he blocked the provision of additional funds to the USPS because he opposes mail-in voting and would prefer voters to attend polling stations on election day.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] No postal system delivers and counts every ballot; some are always lost, late or rejected. Setting reliability as an absolute makes every election in every country a crisis, which drains the standard of any diagnostic value. [Rejecting P2] The operational changes are documented but their consequence is contested. The Postal Service maintained publicly that it had ample capacity to deliver election mail on time, and the premise treats a disputed forecast as an established fact. [Rejecting P3] This projects historical rejection rates onto a much larger and differently composed pool of voters. For rejections to swing a result they would also have to fall unevenly between candidates, which the premise assumes rather than shows. [Rejecting C] 'At breaking point' overstates what follows. That an institution is under strain, and possibly being interfered with for partisan advantage, is a serious charge about the administration of one election — not a demonstration that the democratic system is failing.