If the postal service dies, so does democracy — Republicans are now trying to kill the post office and mail-in voting

Donald Trump and Republican Party are engaged in an all-out war against the expansion of mail-in voting in the era of COVID-19. The flimsy outward justification is concern about voter fraud, but of course, there is no evidence of significant voter fraud surrounding mail ballots. In fact, the only major scandal in the modern era around mail-in voting was a corrupt scheme by Republicans in North Carolina—one that was quickly and easily discovered. Republicans aren’t exactly shy about why they want to restrict the expansion of access to mail voting: they think that the more people are allowed to vote, the better Democrats will do against them. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Republicans are far less concerned about the virus than are Democrats, and that in battleground states with Republican legislatures like Wisconsin, there are far more polling places per capita in red districts than blue ones, which means not only longer lines but more dangerous crowding at polling places. It only adds to the Republican turnout advantage if most people have to vote in person.

The opposition to mail voting is amusing given that it has traditionally been advantageous to Republicans, and even now doesn’t much benefit one party or the other. But facing a disastrous epidemic response and looming recession, Republicans clearly feel their best shot at keeping power is if as few people are allowed to safely vote as possible. It’s a fundamentally immoral stance at odds with the principles of democracy itself.

To me this is a pretty clear article on how republicans are attempting to eliminate all mail-in voting to make voting harder in a scale far larger than anything before by bankrupting and privatizing the USPS.