If you've paid attention over the last few days, you've likely seen a lot of accusations, notably from right-wing grifter extraordinaire James O'Keefe, of USPS employee election fraud

To give you a different perspective on all we did this year, it's time for another thread! https://twitter.com/OversightDems/status/1326289047933816836

First all, O'Keefe has conjured together a couple "examples" of fraud. One involves an undercover camera operator badgering an employee to give him extra ballots. There is never any evidence provided that the employee did.

Safe to throw that in the trash.

Second, O'Keefe has an anonymous clerk in Michigan claiming to have been told to backdate ballots after the election to make them look as though they were postmarked on time. This allegation makes no sense, as Michigan requires ballots be RECEIVED, not postmarked, by election day

Third, and most notably now, O'Keefe has a carrier out of Erie, PA, Richard Hopkins, claiming he was ordered to do the same as the clerk in Michigan...backdate ballots. The allegation in PA carries more weight because PA DOES go by postmark as of right now.

However, in addition to Hopkins being a relative new hire who is probably doing his first election, (his suspension paperwork online lists him as a CCA, and his employee ID# suggests he's been with USPS for less than two years), he can't even keep a straight story.

I can't speak for his office in PA, but in my large sized office, the day after the election, we were ordered to collect and SEGREGATE any ballots received. Not to tamper with them, but to pass them up to supervisors so they COULDN'T be tampered with.

They were being expedited up to processing centers, and then to election offices, without being in any extra hands, precisely so they would be MACHINE canceled, and therefore intercepted BEFORE anyone could ever try to backdate by hand.

And even all of those efforts were an extraordinary extra step to ensure election accuracy: of all of the scores of routes in our office, representing a six figure population center, we received fewer than two dozen ballots the day after the election. I personally received ZERO.

The idea that a supervisor would jeopardize their livelihood to get a couple dozens, or even a couple hundred, ballots of unknown party identity processed after the election doesn't even make sense. If it was a directive handed down in error, it was likely rescinded shortly after

To the contrary, and MORE TO THE POINT, USPS and its employees have gone OUT OF THEIR WAY this election season to be beyond reproach.

Obviously the sabotage of people like DeJoy makes headlines, but the work ON THE GROUND is the opposite of what O'Keefe and others suggest.

This is my third presidential election, in addition to two other midterms, and the conduct in delivering election mail is above and beyond the standard of any other mail we deliver, including express and priority.

If curtailment is ever necessary for third class mail during an election, election mail (ballots, ads, registration forms, etc), most of which is itself third class, is NEVER held back. Not even for a day, not even 3 months before an election.

On a given day, every day between September and election day, each route was receiving hundreds, if not THOUSANDS of election mail pieces in addition to normal volumes. Every piece went. Every day.

In a normal time of year, if a few letters or magazines are out of order because of a computer, we would simply bring them back the next day when they could be manually sorted.

But political mail? NEVER. If you were at your 450th delivery point of the day, and you found a single, third class flyer, encouraging a voter to vote for Prop 22 or whatever, and it was your 3rd delivery point of the day? Congrats, you were now backtracking 447 addresses.

And in the week leading up to the election? Even more severe. It's not uncommon to find flyers in your mail for other routes in your office, after you're on the street. During this time, if it was election mail? You were calling a supervisor to retrieve it for redistribution

In the morning, when clerks were distributing mail out to the individual routes, and it was political mail? Welp, you were gonna stand there and wait for them to get every last one of those tens of thousands of pieces distributed, or you were gonna come back later and backtrack.

USPS, on the ground floor, goes OUT OF ITS WAY to not appear prejudiced in electoral matters. Millions of dollars were spent on overtime in the last several weeks, JUST to facilitate last mile delivery of every single piece of political mail the first day it was available.

I know this doesn't gel with the anecdotes that pop up out of random facilities across the country. We are not a pristine, perfect operation. But the idea of systemic fraud, on the scale of something necessary to tilt an election, is absurd. It's a lie.

In fact, to the contrary of O'Keefe's allegations that we were somehow subverting democracy by pushing EXTRA ballots through, the reality on the ground is we probably INADVERTANTLY contributed to the delay of some ballots, as you've seen in other stories around the country.

EVEN if you buy his outrageous allegation that we are perverting the vote in some way by pushing through late ballots, this would be a mere OFFSET to the countless ballots that didn't get postmarked or delivered on time because of delays WE CAUSED.

At the end of the day, any allegation that USPS played any role in election fraud, particularly on the scale necessary to tilt Trump's loss into a win, is patently absurd. The last desperate gasp of a flailing halfwit, and his army of delusional sycophants.