President Biden announced three nominees Wednesday to fill vacant seats on the U.S. Postal Board of Governors. His candidates are a former deputy postmaster general, a mail voting advocate and a former postal union lawyer.
Filling those seats would bring Democrats closer to their goal of ousting U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a GOP donor installed last year by Trump allies on the board, though Biden would also likely need to replace a current board member to secure the votes to remove DeJoy.
The news of Biden’s picks was first reported by the Washington Post while a contentious hearing was underway, with DeJoy and other postal service figures testifying before the House Oversight Committee.
The selection of DeJoy by Trump’s allies was controversial from the moment he was first named. But criticisms of his USPS approach reached a fever pitch when slapdash operational changes he instituted threatened the postal service’s ability to cope with the pandemic surge in mail voting.
Notably, two of the three nominees Biden has named have expertise in facilitating vote-by-mail.
Amber McReynolds is a former election official in Colorado, a state that was on the vanguard of expanding mail voting. She later became the president and CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute, which advises election officials across the country on scaling up their programs. She was also a prominent voice in rebuking false claims about mail voting in the 2020 election.
Another Biden pick, former Deputy Postmaster General Ron Stroman, earned the respect of the election community for his work inside the postal service, where he spent nine years before resigning from the board last year. Stroman elevated efforts to help election officials coordinate with their local postal officials on election mail services.
After he left the postal service, Stroman joined the Democracy Fund as a senior fellow around the time that mail voting became a focal point of 2020 election planning. There he spoke out against the operational changes under DeJoy that were slowing mail delivery and threatening mail voting.
