The postal service has been the main form of sending letters, packages, etc. for over 200 years.
They have struggled to keep up with technology, but have managed to do so when switching from newspapers to letters to being a package delivery system. Throughout their funding struggles in the past, COVID-19 has hit them the hardest. The government and more specifically the House of Representatives were suspecting that USPS would have to shut down due to safety circumstances back when COVID-19 first hit us. This would have resulted in millions of job losses throughout the nation.
Throughout this new pandemic, USPS workers continued to come to work and risk their safety for the good of their customers and community.
“I felt good going to work because there was a job that needed to be done and it’s our job to put our community first.” Amina, a USPS worker going on 5 years of service, said. She had also mentioned that urgent mail/packages like medication and bills that needed to be paid needed to get to people. The USPS is a federal agency, and if they had decided to shut down due to COVID-19 millions of jobs would be lost, the economy would drop, and overall there would be a major upset throughout the nation.
Causing an even bigger upset among the USPS community and many who depend on it, President Donald Trump has stated that he does not support the funding that the USPS desperately needs because he does not support mail-in voting. This raises many speculations that he is doing this for political gain.
In an interview with Fox News, the president stated, “They want three and a half-billion dollars for something that’ll turn out to be fraudulent, that’s election money basically. They want three and a half-billion dollars for the mail-in votes. Universal mail-in ballots. They want $25 billion, billion, for the Post Office. Now they need that money in order to make the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots.”
There are 2 points of view on mail-in voting. Those who do not support it believe that anyone can steal ballots and write them in for other people tampering with the voting system. Then there are the people who support it because they want to remain safe and be able to social distance from the safety of their homes.
Amina is one of these people, she says, “I support mail-in voting because we want to keep our community safe.”