Amazon, Inc., run by Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board opposing an effort by employees at a warehouse in Alabama to hold a union election using mail-in ballots.
It gets better. The reasons stated for the company’s opposition to the mail-in election were “concerns about election security run particularly high” due to the use of “an unreliable electronic signature platform.”
Everyone knows where the Washington Post stands on mail-in ballots, especially about their security and signature matching. But Amazon — also a Bezos-owned company — doesn’t appear to share the Post’s confidence in the integrity of a mail-in election.
The company’s position on mail-in voting contradicts that of owner Jeff Bezos’s other major company, the Washington Post. The Post’s editorial board ran multiple articles assailing then-President Donald Trump’s criticisms of mail-in voting. One op-ed, published August 17, called his comments “bogus fear-mongering.”
Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron said in 2019 of Bezos’s tenure as owner of the newspaper, “He hasn’t interfered with a single story. He hasn’t suggested a story. He hasn’t squelched a story. He hasn’t critiqued a story, hasn’t criticized a story,” according to Deadline.
There’s a simple explanation. Union elections are different than political elections, right?
Amazon further claimed that mail-in voting in union elections is fundamentally different from that in political elections. In political elections, the Amazon lawyers wrote, a “continuously updated voter address roll” and the ability to vote in person or by mail “promote security and voter turnout.”
“Continuously updated voter address roll”? In whose country? In what state? On what planet? There are people on some state registrar rolls who have been dead for two years or neglected to change their address in a timely manner.
The fact is, there may be a few more layers of security regarding a mail-in political ballot, but “updated” voter information is not one of them.
You are likely trying to figure out how that adds up, right? The Washington Post, owned by Bezos, called any claims of mail-in voter fraud by Donald Trump and his supporters dangerous and inexcusable. Amazon even banned Parler from its servers, in part to ensure no one could claim voter fraud occurred from mail-in ballots back in November.
But stop trying to make it make sense. It is not supposed to add up.
That’s the bottom line. Bezos is a liberal running a liberal newspaper and can never be called to account for his inconsistencies in thought or deed. Those who should hold him accountable don’t because they like the idea of being able to get away with their own hypocrisy.
It’s not unfair if that’s the way it is. And that’s the way it is. It’s been normalized, this idea of holding two, conflicting, diametrically opposite viewpoints at the exact same time and acting as if nothing is amiss.
If someone who disagrees with you tries the same thing, you can get up on your righteous haunches and shut them down with no fear of being called out for being a hypocrite. That’s the world we live in and we may as well settle in and enjoy it.
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