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SALT LAKE CITY — Community groups rallied Saturday morning at the downtown post office, calling for legislative action to address concerns about recent changes at the U.S. Postal Service that could impact the upcoming general election.
Under restrictions brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of Americans will be casting votes via mail-in ballot for the first time, and states that previously only offered limited vote-by-mail options are scrambling to bring new systems up to speed.
Representatives of the NAACP, Utah AFL-CIO, Alliance for a Better Utah and others worked to fire up a crowd of about 50, underscoring their worries that operational changes at post offices across the country, many of which were under way before the onset of the coronavirus outbreak, could impede on voting rights.
Katie Matheson, communication director for progressive advocacy group Alliance for a Better Utah, said one of the goals of the gathering was to bolster support for the Delivering for America Act. The proposal, which includes $25 billion for the budget-challenged U.S. Postal Service as well as provisions to walk back changes implemented since the first of the year, was under consideration by the U.S. House of Representatives on Saturday in a rare weekend session.
“We’re here because there is sincere concern about whether or not the post office will do what it needs to do to deliver ballots in November,” Matheson said. “We’ve known that the post office has had issues for quite a while, some of which were made worse by the pandemic. No matter how we got here we have an election in a pandemic and people need to be able to vote safely and securely.”
NAACP Salt Lake President Jeanetta Williams drew comparisons between current post office issues, and their potential impacts on mail-in voting, with historical voter suppression tactics that aimed to disenfranchise Black voters.
“Our post offices are under attack and folks in power, and the postmaster general, are attempting to make it harder for Americans to vote by mail,” Williams said. “It wasn’t that long ago when people could not vote simply because of the color of their skin. Blacks were told to count the number of jelly beans in a jar or the bubbles on a bar of soap, if you can imagine that.
“We’re facing voter suppression in 2020 for all Americans.”
This story will be updated.
