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In August 2020, a photograph supposedly showing a United States Postal Service mailbox being removed from a street in Portland, Oregon, and loaded onto a truck was widely circulated on social media: This photograph was circulated around the same time that newly-appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy — a donor to President Trump and the Republican party who reportedly had financial connections to Postal Service competitors such as UPS — was making significant changes to the agency, such as eliminating overtime, removing or reassigning agency leaders, implementing a hiring freeze, and banning employees from making extra trips to deliver mail. This led to accusations that the Postal Service was purposefully slowing down the mail to help the reelection chances of President Trump, who has repeatedly (and falsely) exaggerated the prevalence of mail-in voter fraud. Amidst growing concern about these changes and how they would impact the ability of the post office to handle an expected influx of mail-in voting for the 2020 election due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many saw the above-displayed photograph as further proof that the Trump administration was attempting to suppress the vote. While we can't say for certain if recent policy changes at the Postal Service are related to the election (we took a deeper dive into this claim and found that it was Unproven), mailboxes were actually removed from the streets of Oregon in August 2020. Postal Service spokesperson Ernie Swanson told Willamette Week that mailboxes were being removed due declining mail volume: The reason we're doing it is because of declining mail volume ... Ever since the pandemic came along, people are mailing less for some reason. Swanson also said that mailboxes were only being removed from locations that had multiple mailboxes. For example, if a street corner had two collection boxes, for instance, only one, according to Swanson, would be removed. In locations where we have more than one box sitting in the same spot side by side, we leave one behind, he said. KGW8, a Portland news outlet, reported that four mailboxes had been removed from the streets of Portland, while another 27 were removed from Eugene. Postal Service collection boxes have also been removed in other states such as Montana, and there have been reports of collection boxes being removed in New York. Postal Service spokesperson David Rupert told KOIN 6 News that the mailboxes that were removed in Northeast Portland had been vandalized, and that they were being replaced with newer, more secure models: We don't have statistics about how COVID-19 has impacted the volume of mail. However, a fact sheet from the Postal Service does show that the volume of mail has decreased over the last decade. In 2009, 77.6 billion pieces of first class mail were sent through post office. In 2019, that number sat just below 55 billion. Conversely, the number of delivery points has increased by about 9 million over the last decade. It should also be noted that removing collection boxes has been a cost saving measure used by Postal Service for years. In 2011, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that number of collection boxes had declined by 60% between 1985 and 2011. Kim Frum, the senior public relations representative for the Postal Service, told us there are about 142,000 blue steel collection boxes currently in operation across the United States. Frum added that the decision to remove or install boxes is based on the volume of mail that an area receives: To sum up, it is true that the U.S. Postal Service removed mailboxes in states such as Montana and Oregon in August 2020. While the service has been reducing the number of these collection boxes for years in order to cut costs, these recent removals caused concern due to the proximity of the 2020 election, and an expected increase in mail-in voting due to the pandemic.
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