Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is calling the lawmakers back into session from a summer recess to vote on funding for the U.S. Postal Service as the new postmaster general proposes cost-cutting measures.Democrats fear that the cuts in service are aimed at delaying the delivery of mail-in ballots in the November 3 presidential election.FILE – U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, left, is escorted to a meeting in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office on Capitol Hill in Washington, Aug. 5, 2020.Postmaster General DeJoy is a wealthy Republican donor and a Trump appointee. He has yet to say if he will testify. But Schumer says he should be removed if he “refuses to come before Congress.”White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows denies charges that Trump is trying to manipulate the voting process.“The president of the United States is not going to interfere with anybody casting their votes in a legitimate way whether it’s the post office or anything else,” Meadows told CNN Sunday.But he says the White House is afraid that an avalanche of mail-in ballots will postpone the results of the 2020 election. “A number of states are now trying to figure out how they are going to go to universal mail-in ballots,” Meadows said. “That’s a disaster where we won’t know the election results on Nov. 3 and we might not know it for months, and for me that’s problematic because the Constitution says that then a Nancy Pelosi in the House would actually pick the president on Jan. 20.”The number of mailed-in ballots is expected to skyrocket this year because voters may be afraid to stand in line at polling stations to vote in person during a pandemic. As US Expands Mail-in Voting, Delays in Results Could Sow Doubt Due to concerns about the spread of the coronavirus, a growing number of U.S. states are expanding options for voting by mail instead of in person for the November presidential election. Voting by mail has a long history in the U.S., dating back to the Civil War. However, President Donald Trump claims mail-in voting will lead to election fraud or months of uncertainty following the vote. White House Correspondent Patsy Widakuswara reports.Nine of the 50 states are planning to conduct their voting in November almost exclusively by mail. Millions of voters in other states can get a mail-in ballot if they ask for one. Trump and first lady Melania Trump have already requested mail-in ballots in their adopted home state of Florida.Trump has said there is a difference between a mail-in ballot and an absentee ballot that is needed when a voter will be away from his precinct on Election Day.Many analysts say there is no evidence that voting by mail gives one party an advantage over the other and says making it harder to cast a ballot through the mail could backfire on the Republicans, who tend to be older voters who may prefer to vote by mail rather than in person in a pandemic.
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