As Democrats attempt to push through the idea of mail-in ballots and the Trump Administration insists that it could lead to voter fraud, leftists are now starting to claim that President Donald Trump is trying to steal the election, suggesting that he is actively removing or locking mailboxes so people are not able to vote, according to the Daily Wire. Trump has made no drastic changes to the United States Postal Service but has rather maintained the system that was already in place.
The far left has decided to use routine U.S. Postal Service maintenance as so-called evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the Trump Administration. One of the latest examples of this falsehood is from former NBA player Rex Chapman, who tweeted a photo on Sunday of locked mailboxes in Burbank, California, and proceeded to suggest that the Trump Administration was threatening democracy.
“Burbank, California: In your entire life have you ever seen a LOCKED mailbox at the USPS? Now you have. A disgrace and immediate threat to American democracy. Shame on them. Shame on the GOP. Where are you @senatemajldr?” Chapman tweeted.
Burbank, California:
In your entire life have you ever seen a LOCKED mailbox at the USPS?
Now you have.
A disgrace and immediate threat to American democracy. Shame on them. Shame on the GOP.
Where are you @senatemajldr ? pic.twitter.com/YcbVUTnv37
— Rex Chapman???? (@RexChapman) August 17, 2020
The photo, of course, was instantly debunked, as the Daily Caller says it did a simple Google search to find out why the mailboxes were locked. It turns out that the mailboxes were locked due to fishing and stealing mail.
“Turns out that fishing, or stealing mail, has become so common that postal officials have been retrofitting boxes around the San Fernando Valley and other areas to make them more tamper proof, said Richard J. Maher, spokesman for Post Office operations in Los Angeles and Orange counties,” The Los Angeles Daily News reported in 2016.
Chapman was met with a flurry of people debunking his ridiculous proposition. Of the many people responding to him was Twitchy editor Greg Pollowitz, who personally debunked the claims that the Trump administration was locking mailboxes—in August—to steal the November election.
“This is my post office. These mailboxes are open on the other side, you just have to get out of your car to mail them. It’s been this way for months. This isn’t part of the purge,” Hartig tweeted.
This is my post office. These mailboxes are open on the other side, you just have to get out of your car to mail them. It’s been this way for months. This isn’t part of the purge. https://t.co/UMyPUiQfGv
— haunted dog (@zandywithaz) August 17, 2020
None of this convinced Chapman that his initial claims had been thoroughly debunked. He continued to retweet others such as Ice-T, who shared his tweet and provided pictures and video of the locked mailboxes (without mentioning that there were slots on the other side where mail could still be inserted), the Daily Wire reported.
This is one of the latest conspiracy theories drummed up by leftists, who had previously tried to claim that Trump was removing postal boxes in an effort to prevent people from voting in November’s national election. The Washington Post reported in 2009 that mailboxes had been disappearing for decades, but they are now suspiciously silent on the matter.
“Across the country, stalwart blue ‘collection boxes’ like the one on Flack Street in Wheaton are disappearing. In the past 20 years, 200,000 mailboxes have vanished from city streets, rural routes and suburban neighborhoods — more than the 175,000 that remain. In the Washington area alone, half the blue boxes that were on the streets nine years ago have been pulled up and taken to warehouses to molt in storage or be sold for scrap, leaving 4,071 mailboxes remaining in the District, Northern Virginia and the Maryland suburbs,” the outlet reported.
The Post included in their report a graph showing that the volume of mail has also declined during that time.
Mailboxes were also reportedly removed while Obama was in office. The U.S. Postal Service’s Inspector General noted that at the end of the fiscal year 2016, “there were about 153,000 collection boxes” nationwide and that the USPS had “been removing underused boxes, with about 14,000 boxes removed over the past five years,” the Daily Wire noted.