Vote-by-Mail Is the Easy Part

What comes after the election could be wrenching for the USPS

- Devin Leonard

If there’s one thing Kenny Montgomery thought he could always count on, it was the arrival of the U.S. mail. He’d delivered it himself during heat waves and blizzards in Rochester, N.Y. He trudged through the city with a mail sack over his shoulder during the 1991 ice storm that closed businesses and government offices and left residents cowering in their homes without power. They might not have been able to turn on the lights, but they got their mail.

Last month, however, on the morning of Aug. 1, Montgomery, president of the local branch of the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC), saw his faith shaken. Almost 120 of his members reported to the city’s eight post offices, he says, and found that trucks had brought them packages from processing plants but not a single piece of what he classifies as mail. No letters, no bills, no postcards, greeting cards, magazines, catalogs, or fundraising appeals. “This is my 33rd year of service,” he says. “There are light days, and there are heavy days, but I have never experienced a day where no mail shows up.”

That’s when Montgomery began to fear for the future of the 245-year-old U.S. Postal Service. If this was the service Americans could now expect, why wouldn’t they turn to FedEx Corp., United Parcel Service Inc., or some other private operation that brings things to their doors? “If this continues, we’re going to lose the confidence of our customers,” he says. “It snowballs from there.”