Seattle-area postal workers ‘don’t see a plan’ to fix crucial mail-sorting machines before election
Aug 20, 2020, 2:39 PM
An elections worker loads unopened ballots into a machine for sorting at the King County Elections headquarters on August 4, 2020. (Photo by David Ryder/Getty Images)
(Photo by David Ryder/Getty Images)
Gov. Jay Inslee expressed concerns Thursday, that recently-commissioned mail-sorting machines in Seattle-area post offices aren’t going to be repaired in time for November’s presidential election.
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Trump-appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy came under fire in early August for a series of changes he enacted to the U.S. Postal Service, including the elimination of overtime, decommissioning mail-sorting machines, removing mailboxes, and no longer treating election mail as first class mail.
On Tuesday, he announced that he would be halting those changes until after the election, in the wake of concerns that they would compromise the delivery of mail-in ballots in November.
Questions have lingered in the days since, with uncertainty over post offices will be replacing sorting machines and mailboxes that had been decommissioned before DeJoy halted his changes. According to a report from KUOW, 40% of mail-sorting machines the Seattle-Tacoma area had already been dismantled prior to Tuesday.
USPS machines are capable of sorting over 20,000 letters in an hour, and are roughly the size of a city bus. Without them, USPS employees tell KUOW that it “would take a crew of 20 to 30 people hand-sorting the mail all night to do what one of these machines can do in a couple hours.”
Gov. Inslee’s office recently spoke to management within Seattle’s USPS office, who assured him that “they intend to replace what they broke.” He also spoke to workers, though, who claim that no such plan has been put into place.
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“We’ve been told by one officer those are going to be repaired, but we have recent reports from the working people actually doing it that they have been broken and can’t be repaired,” Inslee said during a Thursday press conference. “They are very concerned about this, because they don’t see a plan to actually fix what the Trump administration broke.”
Inslee qualified the alleged plans to replace decommissioned mail sorting machines as “uncertain,” and that the “right decision is to not trust that (the USPS is) going to fulfill what they say they are going to do.”
“The situation is still fraught with concern,” he added. “It was pleasing that the postmaster who got caught with his hand in the cookie jar has now said that he will cease and desist these onerous and illegal actions, but it is not enough — he needs to fix what he has already broken.”
That’s largely the motivation behind state Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s decision to move forward with a recently-filed lawsuit, which seeks to end the reductions enacted by DeJoy, and replace decommissioned mail-sorting machines as quickly as possible.
“We need to have a judicial decree ordering them to fix these machines,” Inslee noted. “Until we get that, we will be appropriately skeptical.”
