Lately, their accounts have come slowly. She said the mailbox outside her rural post office was among many in the entire country that were recently closed or removed, until an angry backlog forced the Postal Service to stop. Ms Sparrevohn said she intended to vote absent, but that she would reduce her vote instead of trusting it after the post.
“I do not know when it will arrive,” she said.
In Fort Benton, Mont., Leone Cloepfil, 75, began worrying about her mail in July, when her Visa payment was not delivered, and she was paid a $ 35.04 fee. She recently had to stop driving after the stupidity in her foot became so bad that she could no longer feel the pedals, so she said she had no choice but to trust her mood to the post.
“I can not say I am 100 percent sure,” she said. “It’s a mess.”
Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat in rural Montana, has received 4,800 calls since the pandemic over the Postal Service. One of the complaints was from a neighbor in the 600-person town of Big Sandy who was running medication while waiting for a refill to arrive in the mail. (Mr. Tester’s Republican opponent in Montana, Senator Steve Daines, also objected to the postmaster’s new policy, but did not respond to a question from an interview.)
“It’s worse than it has ever been,” Mr Tester said. ‘It hurts in rural America. It makes no sense. “
Rural residents know that sparsely populated backcountry routes and small post offices are not money makers for an agency that loses tens of billions of dollars due to health care congressional fees and declines in postal volume.
But in places that were already isolated due to poor internet access, people said the post office was the only institution that mandated to serve them at a flat cost, regardless of the weather or how far they were. Like a hospital, school or supermarket – all closed around America – they said a post office anchored a city’s survival.
