The Democratic Party of Virginia has filed a lawsuit contending that hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots could be caught up in the glacially-paced USPS mail delivery system, threatening to disenfranchise masses of voters and impact the commonwealth’s tight gubernatorial race.
Last week, the party filed a lawsuit claiming that as many as 300,000 Virginians intend to cast their ballots in Tuesday’s critical election by mail, but local USPS branches have failed to deliver ballots in time for voters to fill them out and return them by the deadline.
“Thousands of absentee ballots currently sit at postal facilities throughout the Commonwealth, unprocessed for weeks on end,” the suit alleges, according to The Washington Times.
The USPS, for its part, insists that no such delays have occurred, and CNN reported Friday that it has agreed to provide daily election mail reports to all concerned parties.
“The Postal Service has a robust and tested process for the proper handling and timely delivery of Election Mail. Our Election Mail processes and procedures are fully operational in Virginia. We are not aware of any processing delays of any ballots within our facilities nor any ballot delivery delays, and we have fully communicated this information to election officials,” the agency’s public relations representative Martha Johnson told the Times in an email.
“Throughout the election cycle we work closely with state and local election officials and have been addressing any concerns that they raise. Daily sweeps are being conducted in all our Virginia facilities,” she added.
In order to be counted, Virginia absentee ballots must be postmarked on or before Election Day, which is Tuesday, Nov. 2, and received by the general registrar’s office by noon on Friday, Nov. 5.
The Democrats claim that the counties of Albemarle, Portsmouth, and James City have seen “significant” delays that they characterized as particularly “egregious” where allegedly “thousands of ballots delivered to postal facilities weeks ago are still outstanding and, weeks later have not yet even been scanned into USPS’s system.”
“Even if these voters eventually do receive their ballots before Election Day, the slowdowns promise that they will not have sufficient time to send them back with assurance that they will arrive in time to be counted,” the suit projects, according to the Times.
The plaintiffs want the court to order the USPS to prioritize and expedite delivery of mail-in ballots and to require that it sees that all ballots are delivered on time to be counted.
In a consent order that does not constitute an admission of any wrongdoing on its part, the USPS has agreed to provide the Virginia Democrats and their lawyers daily reports every day through Nov. 5, confirming that every facility in Virginia conducted an “all clear” process the prior day or a report on the status of any facility that did not, CNN reported.
And just like that, the Democrats are suddenly tremendously concerned about mail-in voting.
You cannot make this stuff up.
If anyone finds this extraordinarily hilarious considering how emphatically we were reassured that the 2020 general election was basically the safest in the entire history of all elections ever, you’re certainly not alone.
All of five minutes ago, it was considered to be the wildest of conspiracy theories to suggest that there could possibly be any concerns at all over widespread mail-in voting.
Now, all of a sudden, it’s about to disenfranchise as many as 300,000 voters?
How does that work?
How is it that we are supposed to trust that the unprecedented number of mail-in ballots sent out and counted in 2020 had absolutely no impact on the outcome of the election, but all of a sudden, the fact that so many voters are relying on mail-in balloting in Virginia’s closely-watched gubernatorial race has become a huge problem requiring constant check-ins from USPS to assure that everything is kosher?
This clearly underscores that it was always perfectly reasonable, no matter what the outcome of 2020, to raise concerns about widespread mail-in voting. However, we all remember the hysteria from the left when former President Donald Trump, his supporters, his proxies and Republicans at large did so last year.
And this remains true no matter which party may be affected by any funny business that could arise from problems with mail-in voting.
Yet the Democrats, like the socialists they’ve become, want to have their cake and eat it too in nearly every single case these days, and sooner or later, they’re going to find out the hard way that this is simply not how it works.