U.S. Postal Service Says it Will Stop Removing Mailboxes Until After Election Day

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Amid fears about obstacles to mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic, the United States Postal Service has announced that it will stop removing public mailboxes until after Election Day.

As President Donald Trump has waged a campaign of lies and attacks on mail-in voting, photos of public mailboxes have circulated on social media and caused alarm. But on Friday, a postal service spokesperson told NBC News that those removals will stop:

The USPS had also intended on removing a number of blue collection boxes around the country, but a spokesman said Friday that it would wait until after Election Day and reevaluate its needs.

“We are not going to be removing any boxes,” said USPS spokesman Rod Spurgeon. “After the election, we’re going to take a look at operations and see what we need and don’t need.”

Earlier, the postal service explained the removal process to KOLD-TV:

For decades, USPS has considered the installation and removal of these boxes based on volume, so boxes that don’t receive a ton of mail are removed and installed in areas of growing populations.

“Removing the box is simply good business sense, in that respect,” said USPS. “It is important to note that anyone with a residential or business mailbox can use it as a vehicle to send outgoing mail.”

Currently, there are nearly 142,000 blue-steel collection boxes nationwide.

But decisions to remove these boxes are also made on a case-by-case basis, so if that box is the ONLY means for sending correspondence in a neighborhood, complex or business center- it will probably be kept.

“In the past few years, greater emphasis has been placed on stabilizing the number of collection boxes in use and relocating low-use boxes to high traffic areas such as shopping centers, business parks, grocery stores, etc. for increased customer convenience.”

USPS says this is a normal operational procedure to make sure the majority of blue-steel mailboxes are placed in areas with high mail-traffic.

Trump has made no secret of his opposition to universal mail-in voting, citing it as the reason he opposes additional funding for the postal service as part of a stalled coronavirus relief package.