NEWS & OPINION FEATURE
LOST IN THE MAIL
Is new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy hitting the self-destruct button on democracy?
Pg. 6 AUG 26 - SEP 8, 2020 - QCNERVE.COM
BY JORDAN GREEN
The Wisconsin primary election on April 7 was the first in the United States after the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the nation, leading to business and school shutdowns as people adjusted to limit inperson encounters to slow the spread of the virus. Requests for absentee ballots, also known as mail-in ballots, shot up to 1.3 million, a 440% increase over the last presidential primary in April 2016, the Wisconsin Election Commission reported. Inevitably, there were hiccups. Three tubs of absentee ballots from 749 voters in Appleton and Oshkosh were found at the US Postal Service’s (USPS) Milwaukee Processing & Distribution Center after the election. Thousands of ballots requested two weeks before the election were never delivered to voters. Almost 400 ballots mailed in by voters did not receive postmarks, forcing election officials to confer with the Postal Service to determine whether they should be counted. The troubled Wisconsin primary prompted the Office of the Inspector General at the USPS to issue a recommendation on June 7 that the agency “develop and implement an action plan with timelines to address the potential national issues (ballot deadlines, postmarks, tracking technology, political and election mail coordinator outreach) identified in this report.” A week later, Louis DeJoy, a Greensboro businessman and political fundraiser who has reportedly contributed more than $1.2 million to the Trump Victory Fund, took the helm of the agency through appointment by its Board of Governors with a very different preoccupation. Reflecting on his first eight weeks on the job during remarks to the USPS Board of Governors on Aug. 7, DeJoy said the agency is in a “dire” financial position due in part to “a broken business model,” and vowed to rein in costs and bring efficiency to the organization.
Since mid-July, congressional Democrats have been raising concerns about the Postal Services’ commitment to returning mail-in ballots with mounting alarm, while observing operational changes at the agency that are resulting in clearly discernible slowdowns in service. In a July 16 letter to DeJoy, five US senators, led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, noted that mail-in ballots cast in the Pennsylvania primary — a
“If mail ballots arrive late and are uncounted, some voters may be disenfranchised,” they warned. While DeJoy has been implementing operational changes at the Postal Service that Democratic lawmakers fear will compromise the integrity of the balloting, President Trump has been actively undermining public confidence in mail-in voting. In late May, Trump falsely tweeted that California would send absentee ballots to “anyone in the state,” including “people that aren’t citizens.” “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent,” he wrote. “Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed.” And in late July, the president escalated his false and alarmist rhetoric with a tweet predicting that “2020 will be the most inaccurate and fraudulent election in history” because of mail-in voting, while making the unprecedented suggestion that the LOUIS DEJOY WAS NAMED POSTMASTER GENERAL IN JUNE. election should be PHOTO BY DAVID SIQUEIROS delayed. Absenteecritical swing state in the November election — leapt ballot fraud has marred some elections in the past, from 80,000 in 2018 to more than 500,000 in 2020. including the 2018 contest in North Carolina’s 9th “The success of mail voting is dependent [on] a Congressional District, in which the NC Board of number of federal, state and local entities working Elections threw out the results after a political in coordination,” they wrote. “Election officials face operative harvested fraudulent ballots to benefit the difficult challenge of planning the administration the Republican candidate. But Richard L. Hasen, an of this upcoming election — including arranging elections expert at the University of California Irvine, election mailings, sending ballots to voters on told the Associated Press that fraud is “extremely time, setting deadlines to mail back ballots, and rare” in five states that already relied primarily coordinating with the Postal Service to meet its on mail-in voting before the pandemic, including requirements — with increasingly strained budgets. heavily Republican Utah.
A Greensboro Power Couple Louis DeJoy and his wife, Dr. Aldona Wos, are longtime Republican Party patrons in North Carolina, with a history of largesse and a trail of politicians keen to receive their favor. A native New Yorker, DeJoy moved his company New Breed Logistics to High Point in the 1990s, building it into an organization with 70 distribution centers and 7,000 employees before selling it for $615 million to XPO Logistics in 2014. Befitting DeJoy’s status as a new commercial baron and the couple’s budding stature as political movers, they paid $5.9 million in 2005 for a mansion in Greensboro’s Irving Park neighborhood that was originally built in 1934 for textile executive Herman Cone. In May 2019, DeJoy was named the national finance chairman for CLT Host 2020, making him the lead fundraiser for the local organizing committee behind the Republican National Convention. Wos, however, was the first of the two to build a political reputation, landing a position as North Carolina finance co-chair for George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, propelling her into an ambassadorship to Estonia after he won. The daughter of a father who served in the Polish Home Army during World War II and survived a German concentration camp, Wos maintains a strong interest in national security and serves as a trustee of the Washington-based Institute of World Politics, a graduate school for young people interested in national security and diplomacy. Her relationship with the institute provided her with the opportunity to arrange an appearance by founder John Lenczowski and former CIA Director James Woolsey at the Grandover Resort in Greensboro in 2016. Throughout the past 15 years Wos and DeJoy have hosted one high-profile visitor after another: a mid-term election fundraiser featuring President Bush at their Irving Park home in 2006; an early campaign stop by then-presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani at NC A&T in 2007; a 2017 fundraiser at their home for President Trump. Following the same trajectory as she did in the Bush years, Wos went from a fundraiser to an appointment to the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships in the Trump administration. In March, Trump appointed Wos ambassador to Canada, a post that is awaiting Senate confirmation. In between Bush and Trump terms, Wos also got involved in North Carolina politics, co-chairing Republican Pat McCrory’s campaign for governor. In 2013, he tapped her to lead the state Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). Wos’ tenure at NC DHHS from 2013 through
