Did USPS employees interfere with SeaTac City Council election?

Could the United States Postal Service have been a tool used by saboteurs to interfere with local elections in the City of SeaTac? Glen Morgan, who runs the website We the Governed, certainly thinks USPS employees could be behind some sneaky election tampering.

Political activist group The Rental Association PAC took a set of mailers supporting conservative SeaTac City Council incumbents and opposing liberal candidates to a USPS location in Seattle, which sends out mailers for Sea Tac, a few days before the Nov. 5 election.

However, the pamphlets were not mailed out before votes were due.

“The post office sat on it for five days, waited until after the election to mail it out,” Morgan told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson Show.

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Morgan pointed out that the date the mailers were delivered to the post office allowed enough time for them to be sent out to voters throughout the city.

Some of the conservative candidates in SeaTac lost by just a few hundred votes. These are votes, he said, that might have been changed if the fliers had been sent out ahead of time.

“You don’t know how much these mailers make a difference one way or the other,” Morgan said.

Was it simply an error that the mailers did not get sent … or something more sinister? Government corruption, he said, often hides behind government incompetence.

“If you’ve got activists working at the U.S. Post Office, sabotaging mailers that politically don’t align with them, then what other things are they doing that are a little bit less easy to document?” he asked.

A formal investigation with the USPS is now underway. Morgan plans to follow it closely with his website.

“The bigger question, of course, beyond this mailer, is, how many times has this happened?” he asked. “And to whom else has this been done?”

Of course, a far better tactic than sabotage if you want to change city leadership is communication. North of SeaTac in Seattle, Morgan advises any residents who want to change their city’s politics to get to know their neighbors, talk about concerns in the city, and reach out to people with whom they disagree. These things should continue to happen long after the election is over, he said.

“This isn’t a blue team/red team kind of thing … getting out there, exposing the truth, confronting corruption and problems when it’s happening, avoiding apathy, don’t be apathetic, absolutely play offense the whole time,” he said. “I think if you do that long enough, eventually the truth gets out there, and no matter how corrupt and incompetent and disastrous … your city council becomes, you actually can make a difference.”

Listen to the Dori Monson Show weekday afternoons from 12-3 p.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.