Louis DeJoy, the Trump administration appointee heading the U.S. Postal Service, appears to have made a formidable adversary out of U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan.
Formidable enough to potentially send Postmaster General DeJoy to jail for refusing to follow Sullivan’s order for the USPS to conduct special searches for hundreds of thousands of missing mail-in ballots.
At a hearing Wednesday morning, a visibly angry Sullivan said he will force DeJoy to testify under oath, to get to the heart of the matter, reports Business Insider.
“The postmaster’s going to have to be deposed or appear before me,” Sullivan said at the hearing.
“After the USPS revealed more than 300,000 ballots had entered postal processing plants but subsequently failed to receive ‘exit scans,’ indicating they might have been misplaced within the mail system, Sullivan ordered the Postal Service to perform a final sweep for those ballots,” reports Yahoo News.
“But the USPS said Tuesday night it wouldn’t follow Sullivan’s order in time to ensure the ballots in 15 critical states were accounted for before polls closed.
The judge wasn’t having it, reports Politico.
“Someone may have a price to pay for that,” Sullivan said.
Sullivan also told a Justice Department lawyer, Joseph Borson, on Wednesday to have Kevin Bray, the USPS official in charge of the mail-in ballot process, appear before him later on Wednesday, reported Business Insider.
Borson replied that he’d have to check to see when Bray might be available.
Which is not the right thing to say to a judge already displeased with executive branch foot-dragging.
“You will have to tell him when he’s available,” Emmet growled. “It’s up to the court when he’s available.”
Also Wednesday, Sullivan issued a new order, instructing the USPS to conduct two sweeps for ballots in Texas, CNN reports.
Like the original order disregarded by DeJoy, it was requested by the NAACP and granted by Sullivan.
The new order requires that any ballots postmarked on or before Election Day found in the Texas sweeps must be delivered to election officials by 5 p.m. Wednesday afternoon. Texas allows for the counting or ballots that arrive by that time, if they are postmarked on or before Election Day.
“The Postal Service processed 115,630 ballots on Tuesday, a volume much lower than in recent days after weeks of warnings about chronic mail delays,” said the Washington Post on Wednesday, citing a USPS report.
The Post noted that almost 7% of ballots in mail sorting facilities on Tuesday “were not processed on time for submission to election officials.”
About 101 million Americans cast their ballots before Election Day, according to a vote tally maintained by Michael McDonald, professor of political science at the University of Florida. Roughly 60 million others voted in person on Tuesday.