Left Plans to Go Postal On What Remains of America's Election Integrity

How the Left plans to transform USPS into the Democrats’ vote-by-mail machine, and how to stop them

America’s most bloated, wasteful, ineffective agency—the U.S. Postal Service—might not be a glamorous thing to fight over, but it’s the next front in the war to undermine our elections.

The postal service is the key to enacting all-mail elections. With it, Democrats can retool this $81 billion organization into the world’s biggest mail-in ballot dump, vacuuming up as many ballots as strategists deem necessary to win razor-edge elections in states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Without it, the plan to push vote-by-mail is dead-on-arrival.

Amazingly, Senate Republicans have the power to stop this radical takeover simply by refusing to confirm President Biden’s next nominee to the USPS Board of Governors, the committee responsible for directing the agency’s operations. But without pressure from the grassroots, we know they’ll probably fall for this trap, just as they’ve fallen for so many before.

Here’s the case for torpedoing the Left’s agenda.

Biden’s Stumbling Block

The USPS Board of Governors has broad oversight over the agency’s operations and leadership, comparable, it says, to “a board of directors of a publicly held corporation.” Critically, that includes the future of Republican Louis DeJoy as postmaster general, who was appointed to the position in June 2020 by President Donald Trump.

The board of governors has sole authority to hire or fire the postmaster general, who serves indefinitely without term limits and could thwart the Left’s plans for the agency. Leftists blame DeJoy, a vote-by-mail skeptic, for slow delivery of mail-in ballots ahead of the 2020 election—something they allege he did on purpose to aid Trump’s reelection, which DeJoy denies. (It is more likely that, as with everything else in 2020, Covid-19 was responsible for slow delivery times.)

Since 2020, Democrats have loudly demanded the board of governors “fire” DeJoy, an act requiring a supermajority of six votes. Here’s the catch: By law, the 9-person Board of Governors is limited to no more than 5 members of either political party, not enough to ensure a reliable vote.

Realizing this, activists launched a campaign in the White House to build an illegal supermajority of 6 governors—all vote-by-mail zealots—while pressuring the board to remove DeJoy.

An Illegal Supermajority

The secret to this scheme is Amber McReynolds.

Until 2021, McReynolds was CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute and Coalition, a pair of advocacy groups that successfully convinced the Democratic Party to adopt mail-in ballots as the ticket to victory in 2020, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

Vote at Home sees all-mail elections as the future of voting, not a stopgap for the 2020 election. Notably, the groups were seeded with money from the postal workers’ union, which stands to flourish under all-mail elections. Vote at Home’s kick-off event was attended by then-AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon (a Democrat elected in the country’s first-ever all-mail federal election), and Oregon Secretary of State Phil Keisling, who later joined Vote at Home’s board. At the event, Keisling positioned voting by mail alongside automatic voter registration, a favorite left-wing policy:

Imagine a state where voters never have to show a photo ID; wait in voting lines; leave home or work early to get to their designated polling place; or worry about bad weather, traffic jams, finding parking or public transportation, or arranging childcare.

AVR’s [automatic voter registration] underlying policy premise is identical to vote-at home’s; if the government knows you’re a citizen, you become a registered voter. [Emphasis added.]

Democrat is as Democrat Does

Perhaps as payback for her role in his 2020 victory, Biden nominated McReynolds to the USPS Board of Governors just 35 days after taking the oath of office in 2021. Cleverly, he nominated her as an “independent”—a ruse that fooled 9 Republican Senators into confirming her in May.

I’ve thoroughly made the case that McReynolds is as partisan as any member of the Board of Governors and ought to be treated as such. She was a registered Democrat until 2010 and an advisor to leftist billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund. Just 10 days prior to McReynolds’ nomination, Vote at Home’s website showed a list of partners—almost all of them political groups—which were mysteriously scrubbed from its website by March. Examples include Rock the Vote, Common Cause, far-left Represent.US, and the Center for Secure and Modern Elections (a front for Arabella Advisors’ $1.6 billion “dark money” network).

Nevertheless, McReynolds’ confirmation freed up Biden to nominate two (overt) Democrats. The result would be 6 “progressive” votes, enough to remove DeJoy and allow the Left to have its way with the postal service.

Common Cause, a liberal litigation group and Vote at Home partner, has an entire lobbying campaign for creating a Biden-appointed, “reform-minded majority” on the USPS Board of Governors to “fix Trump’s manufactured USPS crisis and fire DeJoy.” The far-left activists at Public Citizen call nominating “two new, public interest-minded board members . . . essential to removing DeJoy and restoring USPS as a respected public institution.” A coalition of radicals, socialists, and race-identity groups adds that “the current board is majority white and nearly entirely male,” something Biden must change.

The Looming Battle

When I last wrote on this shadowy campaign, two governors’ terms were still set to expire at the end of 2022. Now the fight to replace them is here—and Republicans aren’t even aware of it.

As of writing, there are 4 Democrats, one “independent,” and 4 Republicans serving on the USPS board of governors. Two governors’ terms expired in December 2022: Republican William Zollars and Democrat Donald Lee Moak.

Obviously, replacing Moak with a Democrat would maintain the board’s current balance. The real race is for the nominee to replace Zollars with a Democrat, bringing the court’s balance to 5 Democrats, the “progressive” McReynolds, and just 3 Republicans.

As early as October 2022 activists began the push for Biden to nominate two Democrats, both of whom retired this year after losing their seats in the 2021-22 redistricting process.

The first is retiring Rep. Brenda Lawrence, who represented Detroit and is a former member of both the American Postal Workers Union and National Association of Letter Carriers. The former has endorsed Lawrence, boasting that she “skillfully defended the public Postal Service from privatization” in Congress and complaining that the board is woefully deprived of black women (Lawrence is black).

The other candidate is New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who replaced Elijah Cummings upon his death in 2019 and was defeated by Jerry Nadler in the 2022 Democratic primary. Maloney is responsible for introducing and passing—with DeJoy’s help—the $57 billion Postal Service Reform Act of 2022, which overhauled healthcare coverage and expanded delivery to six days per week.

There’s no reason not to expect Biden to nominate both, or some other combination of two Democrats. Biden’s nominees have been vetted for their support of vote-by-mail expansion, including his one Republican nominee, Derek Kan.

What does that look like in practice? Last year, the Biden administration sought $5 billion over the next decade to fund USPS election mail operations, providing free postage for ballots and expanding “delivery capacity in underserved areas” (translation: spots brimming with Democratic voters).

Demos, the think tank of the far Left, considers USPS vote-by-mail expansion vital to permanent Democratic control of Washington—alongside federal agency-run voter registration drives, unleashing the Justice Department on red states, and what it calls “prison-based gerrymandering.” Demos specifically wants Biden to nominate Democrats to the board of governors “with special attention to diversity” because too many governors “are white [men].”

Stand and Deliver

Republicans may not have a majority in the U.S. Senate, but they do have the power to filibuster Biden’s nominees or use other procedural means to force the President to the negotiating table. The case for doing so is clear: Democrats already control 5 seats. Seizing any more is unlawful. Republicans may choose to confirm a Democratic nominee to replace Moak, but should firmly reject any attempt to replace Zollars with a Democrat. Alternatively, they could demand McReynolds be relabeled a Democrat, which would ensure Democrats only control 5 seats. That’s only fair.

Congress might go a step further and amend the USPS Board of Governors bylaws to forbid any nominee from declaring himself an “independent,” since the whole purpose of capping membership from either party is to prevent a partisan takeover—exactly what activists are attempting to do.

If Senate Republicans won’t take their stand here, they can’t be trusted to stand anywhere.