The Election Is in the Mail
Welcome to the latest edition of Flux, a weekly newsletter from GEN about the powerful forces reshaping America
At the height of the coronavirus pandemic in New York, I bought a couple of inexpensive posters through an online fundraiser for the nonprofit group Visual AIDS. Cultural institutions everywhere were in desperate need, and here was a group for medically vulnerable artists, offering an unusual opportunity to purchase editions from artists like Wolfgang Tillmans and Nicole Eisenman.
The images finally shipped out once the Northeast started reopening and were mailed around July 6. Nothing arrived in the days after that, so I kept checking the U.S. Postal Service tracking number for the package to see where it was and when it would be delivered. (Getting the mail each day, and tracking its whereabouts, passes for entertainment here in month six of the epidemic.) It stalled out at the “in transit” stage on July 19. Since then there’s been no movement and no updates.
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The idea that a package would take more than a month to get from Jersey City to New York City — less than an hour’s drive, door to door — would have been unfathomable a year ago. I tweeted about the delay, along with others’ growing concerns about the Postal Service, and dozens of people replied with their own tales of mysterious mail delays and packages waylaid “in transit.” This kind of collapse in an essential service once would have launched senators and inspectors general into angry hearings and detailed investigations into failures at specific post offices or delivery routes.
Since then it’s become clear that the managed decay of the postal system Ben Franklin built is a calculated move designed to undermine the 2020 election — and increase Donald Trump’s chances of keeping a hold on power.
“Around the time Trump started musing about delaying the election last week, aides and outside advisers began scrambling to ponder possible executive actions he could take to curb mail-in voting — everything from directing the postal service to not deliver certain ballots to stopping local officials from counting them after Election Day,” reported Anita Kumar in Politico. (For reasons not entirely clear, Democrats have been much more likely to use mail-in voting than Republicans.)
A less specific assault comes in the reorganization of the Postal Service, now helmed by a Trump donor with millions invested in competing delivery services, that has led to a slowdown in mail delivery. And so the congressional calls for investigation this time are aimed at the very top, at Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.
A mail slowdown — even absent other measures to reduce the mail-in vote, such as increasing postage costs to cash-strapped states for mailed-in ballots — could mean thousands of ballots don’t get to voters in time to be returned for Election Day or don’t get to election officials in time to be counted. With the threat of the coronavirus hanging over in-person voters, the election could hang in the balance.
Guided by voices
What if you dedicated your entire life to working in an industry with an especially fraught history of systemic racism? For our new series “Voices From Inside the System,” we asked people to think deeply about the role they play and the work they do in places like the Hollywood studio system (where 77% of all film roles in 2017 went to white actors), the bail bond industry (where Black and Hispanic detainees make up nearly half of the jail population) the prison system (one where one in three Black men born in 2001 can expect to go to prison in their lifetime) and much more.
One more thing…
GEN columnist Sady Doyle has a lot to say about politics, but don’t sleep on her culture essays, like her discussion of Amy Seimetz’s film She Dies Tomorrow, which critics have called “the most 2020 movie of 2020” and how its Gothic qualities echo our present moment:
It seems impossible that one of the scariest events of our lifetime would also be one of the quietest. Yet that’s exactly where we are with Covid-19: living under the threat of terrible and painful death, yet unable to see the thing that is killing us, expected to keep grocery shopping and educating our kids and going for walks while the Grim Reaper shadows our every move. If we feel haunted, it’s because we are. All of the by-now-familiar tropes of quarantine life — texting your ex, writing your novel — are ways of dealing with that terrible fragility. They’re small tasks, meant to ensure that, if we die tomorrow, we won’t leave the most important things undone. Yet no matter how well organized our lives are, death will upend them. The curse is never broken; the (haunted) house always wins. That sense of being rendered small and powerless by your circumstances is at the heart of the Gothic.
