Recently, the United States Postal Service consolidated services by cutting truck routes and shutting down local postmarking machines in Southern Oregon. Outgoing mail has to be sent through Portland.
Southern Oregon American Postal Workers Union President Jeremy Schilling says postal workers’ concern began when they saw firsthand the impacts this had on the 2024 local primaries.
“The postal service said, ‘this won’t have any impact on your election,’ and we had to take them at their word until we had an election,” said Shilling.
Schilling says when postmasters and supervisors realized the primary election ballots needed to be sent to Portland, postal workers were told to take ballots out of the mail and to load them in their personal vehicles and drop them in county drop boxes after post office closing hours.
“We immediately told our members that they should tell their postmaster or their supervisor ‘no we’re not going to do that.’ And the postmasters and supervisors then began doing that themselves. You can’t just break the chain of custody on a ballot,” said Shilling.
