Where is My Mail?

In their 1961 Motown hit Mr. Postman, the Marvelettes sang,

Please Mister Postman
Deliver de letter the sooner de better

Of course, this song was about waiting for a letter from a boyfriend “so far away,” but it could also apply to today’s situation with mail delivery. Yesterday, it occurred to my husband and me that we had missed an important payment in August. We never received the invoice. After calling to fix that problem, we realized that we had not received several other important bills, even though we had changed our address with every possible entity from which we might be billed on May 15. The one bill we did receive, forwarded from our old address, had taken four weeks to reach us and was stamped “final notice — will be referred to a collection agency.” We had not received any prior notices.

The USPS is broken. We know why. Trump’s crony and mega-donor, Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, has been implementing changes that slow mail service since taking office in June. Among these new policies, he has eliminated employee overtime, removed mail-sorting machines from postal facilities, and reorganized or eliminated Postal Service leadership. The intended goal of these changes is to harm mail-in voting for the November 3 election by disenfranchising voters whose ballots are not received in time. Unintended consequences include…