It is indeed an outrageous abuse of power to degrade the USPS in order to prevent ballots from being delivered. But degrading the USPS during a pandemic that's made us more dependent than ever on robust delivery services is a special kind of outrage in and of itself.

It's also worth noting that there's a very nasty positive feedback loop here: if enough people believe (rightly or wrongly) that USPS service has degraded or is unreliable, they'll stop using it, which will reduce their revenue, further degrading the service going forward.

I'm a little reluctant to amplify anecdotes about USPS mishaps for this reason.

Also, Trump is claiming widespread use of vote by mail would require expanding USPS capacity. But it wouldn't. Even if every voter requested & cast ballots by mail, that's a drop in the bucket in terms of overall mail volume. All vote by mail requires is EXISTING postal capacity.

In the worst case, vote-by-mail requires three pieces of mail, at different times: a request from the voter, a ballot package to the voter, and a returned ballot from the voter. That's very little new mail. And places (like Oregon) that currently do default mail voting do fine.

Where you might need extra mail handling capacity is in the county election office, but that's not part of the USPS.

Bulk mailers send far more mail on any given day than election offices do. For an a sense of how much, look in your mailbox.

So current USPS capacity is sufficient for vote-by-mail. No one is asking to expand the postal service to accommodate voting. All that is required is that it not be shruken, as, unfortunately, seems to be happening.

If the goal is to degrade the USPS so much that it can't handle mail-in ballots reliably, that would require almost destroying it completely. Which would have effects on society that would go far beyond even this very consequential election.

Remember that just the PERCEPTION that the USPS is too unreliable to be trusted to deliver ballots is at least as damaging to vote-by-mail as any specific service cuts might be. There's a lot of uncertainty right now about the USPS, and unsubstantiated rumors are very unhelpful.

Elections in the US are almost entirely managed by states and individual counties/townships, but even states that don't do large-scale vote-by-mail generally depend on reliable postal service for their elections. Address verification, sample ballots, etc all use the mail.

Degrading the USPS is one of the very few things a president can do to directly interfere with the ability of states to hold elections. But doing so would be a very blunt instrument, with enormous repercussions beyond just elections.

That said, the reports of sorting machines and mailboxes being removed are very disturbing. But it is so far unclear (one way or the other) just how much the USPS's capacity is actually being reduced here, and whether that reduction is enough to materially affect the election.

If the goal is simply to create the PERCEPTION that the USPS will be unreliable as states debate expanding vote-by-mail, but without actually destroying mail services for businesses that rely on it, highly publicized actions like these could be very effective.

So yes, the removal of postal infrastructure is absolutely disturbing and something that should be vigorously investigated. But it would be premature (and very unfortunate) to conclude from the publicly available evidence so far that vote-by-mail is infeasible in November.

The people who are opposed to expanding vote-by-mail certainly want you (and your state's policymakers) to reach that conclusion, however.

States and counties have extremely limited resources for elections, and right now is when they are making decisions about where to allocate them for November. If they believe the postal service is unreliable, many will choose to focus resources on other voting methods.