What does one get when one combines a U.S. Postal Service in self-admitted chaos with a record number of mail-in votes? A nation where millions of American no longer have confidence in the integrity of the election process.

A red banner at the top of the USPS website says it all: “USPS is experiencing unprecedented volume increases and limited employee availability due to the impacts of COVID-19. We appreciate your patience.”

Remarkably — or is that predictably? — the media make irreconcilable claims about the agency teetering on the brink of bankruptcy for nearly a decade. On one hand, we’re told that people are receiving utility bills and bills for mortgage payments that are already past due, while sent packages are piling up and being delivered weeks late — if they’re delivered at all. Moreover, chaos ostensibly reigns because of 664,000 postal service workers nationwide, 39,383 have tested positive for COVID, and as of January 22, as many as 14,500 postal employees were in quarantine.

Nonetheless, the same NPR that states the postal system has been battered by the impacts of COVID-19 “for much of the past year” assures us the very same reality didn’t affect mail-in voting. “By all accounts, the Postal Service made good on delivering ballots in a timely fashion,” it states.

By all accounts, the USPS is an agency that is being eviscerated by far more competent competition such as UPS, FedEx, and Amazon. Furthermore, millions of Americans have turned to email and other electronic transfers of information that negate the need for traditional mail. Yet despite the fact that revenue is down 9.4% from the previous fiscal year to the current one, and that it lost another $9.2 billion, the agency is, as MSM Microsoft puts it, “immensely overstaffed” with 496,934 career employees and 136,174 non-career employees who manage 31,322 retail post offices in the United States, many of which are in “small towns and rural areas and handle very little mail at all.”

And despite being one of the worst-run agencies in the nation, former Postmaster General Megan J. Brennan made $291,650 in 2019, and current Postmaster General Louis DeJoy reportedly pulled in $303,460 the following year.

Last August, the USPS warned 46 states and the District of Columbia that their absentee voting rules were “incongruous” with the agency’s delivery standards and could result in uncounted ballots. Ironically, Postal Service General Counsel Thomas Marshall was especially concerned about Pennsylvania and Michigan, due to their short deadlines (one week and four days, respectively) between requesting absentee ballots and having them show up in time to be counted. “As a result,” he wrote, “to the extent that the mail is used to transmit ballots to and from voters, there is a significant risk that, at least in certain circumstances, ballots may be requested in a manner that is consistent with your election rules and returned promptly, and yet not be returned in time to be counted.”

DeJoy was called to testify before Congress, where he was accused of deliberately sabotaging USPS operations ahead of the election. This was likely because DeJoy was reportedly a “Trump ally” and thus could not be trusted to do his job.

Despite that concern, the election proceeded and voters cast a record-setting 65 million ballots by mail, or approximately 41% of the total vote.

Democrats, under the guise of eliminating voter “suppression,” would like to make mass mail-in voting a permanent part of the electoral landscape. “The For the People Act of 2021” is a well-strategized effort to make a complete mockery of anything resembling election integrity. It requires states to permit voters to register on the day of a federal election, or during early voting, and limits their authority to remove registrants from official lists of eligible voters based on interstate crosschecks of voter registration. It also prohibits the use of returned, non-forwardable mail as the basis for removing registered voters from the rolls, eliminates rules requiring witness signatures, and prohibits states from imposing restrictions on an individual’s ability to vote by mail. It also requires states to allow voters to sign sworn affidavits to vote — in lieu of presenting photo ID.

That the bill would supersede states’ constitutionally guaranteed rights to set their own election laws? For far too many Democrats, the Constitution is not a guideline for American government and society. It is instead an “impediment” used to enshrine “systemic racism.”

And when Republicans fight back? “Although most legislative sessions are just getting underway, the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy institute, has already tallied more than 100 bills in 28 states meant to restrict voting access,” the AP reports. “More than a third of those proposals are aimed at limiting mail voting, while other bills seek to strengthen voter ID requirements and registration processes, as well as allow for more aggressive means to remove people from voter rolls.”

Decent Americans might ask themselves a simple question: What’s wrong with any of those proposals? As our Mark Alexander reminds us, “Democrats are not interested in election integrity. The only way to ensure the integrity of our election process is to require in-person voting, requiring the voter to present proper identification, and perhaps resorting to paper balloting.”

Ironically, even dedicated leftists know it. Despite the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post championing mail-in voting, Jeff Bezos-owned Amazon is less enchanted with using mail-in voting to determine whether or not the retail giant will be unionized. “We believe that the best approach to a valid, fair and successful election is one that is conducted manually, in-person, making it easy for associates to verify and cast their vote in close proximity to their workplace,” the company said in statement.

The most daunting part of this transparent disconnect? Our ruling class elites no longer feel even mildly compelled to hide their rank hypocrisy. We have reached a perilous point where wholesale corruption is justified by a media that automatically labels any calls for voter integrity as “racist” — even though there’s nothing more racist than automatically assuming that minority Americans are somehow fundamentally incapable of procuring the very same voter ID everyone else is capable of procuring. (Those very same minorities, by the way, have procured ID necessary to board planes, visit a doctor’s office, apply for a mortgage, etc.)

Last week, in a Time Magazine article, “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election,” columnist Molly Ball crowed about how Big Tech, BLM, organized labor, and big business colluded to “save” America from a Donald Trump reelection. “Mail in voting was a critical component of their strategy,” she writes. “In the end, nearly half the electorate cast ballots by mail in 2020, practically a revolution in how people vote.”

It is a revolution Democrats wish to make permanent — just like their grip on power. Republicans can either wise up and fight back or face a simple reality: People who have no faith in the system will not participle in it.

For the GOP, that means de facto extinction. Even worse? That extinction will be self-administered.