A group of activists gathered outside the home of the U.S. postmaster general Saturday to protest what appeared to be the deliberate sabotage of the Postal Service in advance of the upcoming presidential election.
Armed with pots, pans and air horns, demonstrators with the direct action group ShutDownDC showed up at the apartment of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy for a “noise demonstration.” Louis DeJoy, one of Donald Trump’s big donors, is dismantling the U.S. Postal Service ahead of mass mail-in voting in the 2020 presidential election,” the group said in a statement.
Over the past week, the Postal Service removed mailboxes in states such as Oregon, Montana, Indiana, and New York in what Democratic lawmakers said was an attempt to stop mail-in voting by the Trump administration before the Nov. 3 presidential election.
DeJoy is a Trump donor whose business ties appear to pose a conflict of interest with the Postal Service. He was selected to lead the agency in May, and since then, the Postal Service announced it was removing 671 machines used to sort mail across the country.
Trump himself admitted earlier this week that he would block funding for the Postal Service to hamper mail-in voting attempts, which he has repeatedly and falsely argued leads to voter fraud — even as he himself requested a mail-in ballot.
“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,” Trump said Thursday in an interview on Fox Business. “But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting.”
Some protesters were seen stuffing fake absentee ballots into DeJoy’s apartment lobby door during Saturday’s protest, WUSA9 reported.
The Postal Service warned 46 states earlier this week that the slowdown of service may make it harder for mail-in votes to be counted in time for the election.
The inspector general of the Postal Service launched an investigation into DeJoy’s policy changes and his potential conflicts of interest, CNN reported Friday.
HuffPost reached out to the Postal Service and DeJoy for comment
