A federal judge in Pennsylvania is agreeing with Maine’s attorney general that the U.S. Postal Service should be barred from operational changes that earlier this year slowed down mail service and raised fears that presidential votes sent by mail might not be counted.
“It had to stop,” said Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey, who joined five other states in a lawsuit that took aim at practices such as sending out trucks at specific times whether or not they had been loaded with mail, and limiting overtime hours.
“Those delays in the system were making it problematic for people to be able to get their mail delivered on time, get the checks that they need, get prescriptions,” he said. “And certainly in the lead-up to the election, the changes that had been unilaterally made by USPS threatened the people’s ability to vote absentee in a timely manner.”
The union representing postal workers in Maine is also praising the decision. Union Vice President Scott Adams says his members are working with management to plan for the election, and morale is improving.
“We are going to go above and beyond to make sure all election mail is handled properly, all ballots are handled properly. And the service has even conceded that in order to do this there will be extra trips and there will be overtime,” he says.
In his nationwide injunction order, U.S. District Judge Gerald Austin McHugh cited several harms Maine residents testified to, among them a chicken farmer whose regular mail-order of chicks died en route this summer. Secretary of State Matt Dunlap told the court he was fielding calls from state voters who were losing confidence in the election.
The decision aligns with two others elsewhere in the country, all of them finding that the Trump administration’s changes at the post office were substantial and should have been subject to a public hearing.