Editor’s Introduction

I write this in mid-November of 2020, after one of the most contentious presidential elections in my lifetime. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many states began allowing and even encouraging the use of absentee voting/mail-in ballots to reduce the risk of infection during in-person voting. Although he himself votes by mail, the outgoing president began a systematic and sustained campaign of maligning the legality and validity of absentee ballots, claiming without evidence that they were more vulnerable to “illegal voting” and fraud, and encouraging his constituent base to vote in person on election day. He also undermined the United States Postal Service’s capacity to deliver absentee ballot applications and absentee ballots themselves by engineering the naming of one of his mega donors, Louis Dejoy, as Postmaster General. Dejoy immediately set about instituting policies that included removing mailboxes, “cuts to overtime . . . limiting mail delivery trips . . ....