A Federal Judge Wants Louis DeJoy to Testify Under Oath About Mail Delays

The USPS refused to comply with a court order to make sure mail ballots were sent on time.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is sworn in before testifying during a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on the Postal Service in Washington on August 24, 2020. Tom Williams/Pool Photo via AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

A federal judge excoriated lawyers for the United States Postal Service on Wednesday for failing to comply with a court order on Election Day requiring postal inspectors to conduct sweeps of processing plans to make sure mail ballots were sent on time. ā€œIn no uncertain terms, Iā€™m not pleased about this 11th-hour development last night,ā€ Judge Emmet Sullivan told Justice Department lawyers representing USPS. ā€œYou can tell your clients thatā€”and someone might have a price to pay.ā€

Sullivan said he wanted Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to sit for a deposition or appear before his courtroom under oath, saying that the failure to follow the court order starts ā€œat the top of the food chain.ā€ Samuel Spital of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which is challenging USPS policies that have lead to major mail delays, said he might seek a contempt-of-court order against DeJoy next week.

Last month, Sullivan ordered USPS to reverse policies implemented under DeJoy that led to major delays over the summer, such as prohibiting postal workers from making extra trips to deliver the mail. The Postal Service was slow to comply with the court order, and mail delays have gotten worse closer to the election, leading to fears that ballots will be rejected if they do not arrive on time. At least 30 states require mail ballots to be received by Election Day.

Yesterday, there were media reports that 300,000 ballots were not delivered on time, but that number is misleading because USPS is sending ballots without scanning them to expedite delivery, according to the agency. The Postal Service said it had no time to complete the sweep Sullivan ordered yesterday, but did its own investigation and found only 13 missing ballots, which were subsequently delivered on time. 

Still, as of Election Day, there were nearly 27 million mail ballots that had been sent to voters but not mailed back. We donā€™t know if those voters dropped their ballots off, voted in person, or didnā€™t vote at all, but itā€™s still possible that thousands of votes could be rejected for arriving too late.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate