State and local election officials from across the country on Wednesday warned that problems with the nation’s mail delivery system threaten to disenfranchise voters in the upcoming presidential election, telling the head of the US Postal Service (USPS) that it hasn’t fixed persistent deficiencies.
The officials said in a letter that over the past year, including the just-concluded primary season, mailed ballots that were postmarked on time were received by local election offices days after the deadline to be counted.
They also noted that properly addressed election mail was being returned to them as undeliverable.
Repeated outreach to USPS to resolve the issues had failed, the officials added.
“We have not seen improvement or concerted efforts to remediate our concerns,” stated the letter. “In fact, many of the issues raised by election officials are echoed in the recent findings of the USPS Office of Inspector General Audit, Election Mail Readiness for the 2024 General Election.”
The letter to Louis DeJoy, the US postmaster general, came from two groups that represent top election administrators in all 50 states.
A message seeking a response from USPS was not immediately returned.
The two groups, the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of State Election Directors, said local election officials “in nearly every state” are receiving timely postmarked ballots after election day and outside the three to five business days USPS claims as the standard for first-class mail.
The letter comes less than two weeks after DeJoy said in an interview that the USPS was ready to handle a flood of mail ballots expected this election year and as Donald Trump continues to sow doubts about US elections by falsely claiming he won in 2020.
That year, amid the global pandemic, election officials reported sending just over 69m ballots in the mail, a substantial increase from four years earlier.
Both Democrats and Republicans have launched efforts to push supporters to vote early, either in person or by mail to “bank” their votes before election day on 5 November.
Vote by mail requests in Florida have dropped by 50% in 2024 compared to the 2022 midterms, as Ron DeSantis, the state’s Republican governor, signed a law in 2021 to cancel all standing vote-by-mail requests after the 2022 midterms.
USPS officials told reporters last month that almost 98% of ballots were returned to election officials within three days in 2020, and in 2022, the figure was nearly 99%. DeJoy said he would like to inch closer to 100% this election cycle and claimed the USPS is better positioned to handle ballots than in 2020.
But officials in rural states have been critical of the USPS for years as it has consolidated mail-processing centers. The USPS is planning on further slowing mail delivery in rural areas and across long distances after the 2024 election.
The Save the Post Office Coalition, a coalition of over 300 groups including the ACLU, Public Citizen, NAACP and the American Postal Workers Union, have called for Congress to pass the Election Mail Act, authored by Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar and congresswoman Nikema Williams of Georgia, to improve election mail delivery and tracking security. The bill has not reached a vote in the House or Senate.
“Congress should create a national standard for voting by mail so that everyone can have confidence their vote will be counted – no matter their zip code, no matter how they chose to vote,” said Williams in a press release of the reintroduction of the legislation in 2023.
In the letter, election officials warned that any election mail returned to an election office as undeliverable could trigger a process outlined in federal law for maintaining accurate registered voter lists. That means a voter could be moved to “inactive” status and be required to update their address to be able to participate in the election.
Scott Schwab, Kansas secretary of state, sent his own letter to DeJoy this week. He noted nearly 1,000 ballots from his state’s August primary election couldn’t be counted because they arrived too late or without postmarks – and more continue to come in.
Schwab and other Kansas election officials also said some ballots arrive on time but without postmarks, which keeps them from being counted under Kansas law. Schwab told DeJoy that local postal clerks have reported to election officials that they can’t add postmarks later even if it’s clear that the USPS handled the ballot ahead of the mail-in deadline.
Kansas will count ballots postmarked on or before election day if they arrive within three days. The Republican-controlled legislature created that grace period in 2017 over concerns mail delivery had slowed after the USPS shut down seven mail-processing centers in the state, outsourcing processing to centers out of state.
In their letter Wednesday, election officials also said colleagues across the US have reported that USPS staff, from managers to mail carriers, are uninformed about the service’s policies for handling election-related mail, are given inconsistent guidance and misdeliver ballots.
“State and local election officials need a committed partner in USPS. We implore you to take immediate and tangible corrective action to address the ongoing performance issues with USPS election mail service,” the officials concluded. “Failure to do so will risk limiting voter participation and trust in the election process.”
The Associated Press contributed reporting
