The post is a public trust — do not abuse it

I spent years as postmaster general because I understood one thing: the value of a letter depends entirely on its credibility. A letter that cries wolf trains the recipient to ignore the next one. Alaska's officials, according to the New York Post, sent more than 3,000 letters asking voters to verify their citizenship ahead of the 2026 midterms — and then conceded that outdated DMV data had flagged a substantial number of people who were American citizens all along. That is not security. That is noise dressed as diligence.

Here is the household analogy I reach for: if a shopkeeper audits his ledger but uses figures that are five years out of date, he will accuse honest customers of debts they have already paid. The embarrassment falls on him, not on them. The proper discipline is to keep the ledger current before you send the dunning notice, not to send the notice and sort out the error afterward.

I hold no brief for fraud, in elections or anywhere else. A republic that cannot trust its own rolls is in genuine danger. But the New York Post's account makes plain that the instrument chosen here — mass letters drawn from stale data — created far more confusion than it resolved. The cure must be proportionate to the disease, and the disease must be diagnosed accurately first. Purging honest voters from the rolls is itself a form of theft, no less real for being bureaucratic rather than financial.

The information infrastructure of self-government — voter rolls, postal notices, official correspondence — carries the same obligation I always argued the printing press carried: accuracy is not optional. A printer who sets false type does not become innocent because his error was accidental. He is still obliged to run a correction. Alaska's election officials owe those 3,000 households at minimum a clear, prompt retraction and an explanation of how the data will be corrected before the next mailing goes out.

My counsel to any citizen who receives such a letter: do not ignore it, however unjust it feels. Respond, document your response, and keep a copy — just as any prudent tradesman keeps a duplicate of every receipt. The burden should not fall on you, but in practice it does, and indignation without documentation helps no one. Then, once your own standing is secured, press your local representatives to demand the state reconcile its DMV records with its voter files properly, openly, and before the next election cycle begins. A democracy is only as sound as the accuracy of the books it keeps on itself.