State election directors fear the Postal Service can’t handle expected crush of mail-in ballots
MINNEAPOLIS — State election directors across the country expressed serious concerns to a top U.S. Postal Service official Tuesday that the system will not be able to handle a expected increase in postal voting in the November elections.
Steven Carter, manager of elections and government programs for the Postal Service, tried to reassure directors at a meeting in Minneapolis that the system’s Office of Inspector General will release an election mail report next week with “encouraging” performance figures for the year so far.
“The data that we’re seeing shows improvements in the right direction,” Carter told a conference of the National Association of State Election Directors. “And I think the OIG report is very complimentary about how we’re handling elections right now.”
But state election directors told Carter they remain concerned that too many ballots will not be delivered in time to be counted in November. They based their fears on past problems and a disruptive consolidation of postal facilities throughout the country that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has been postponed until after the elections.
Monica Evans, executive director of the District of Columbia Board of Elections, told how she never received her mail-in ballot for her own June primary. She ended up voting in person.
“We had, at last count, over 80 ballots that were mailed in May in time for our June 4 primary,” Evans said, noting that her office had been able to accept them as late as June 14, but they were still arriving late. “We followed up and we kept getting told, ‘We don’t know what happened. We don’t know what happened.’”
As former President Donald Trump baselessly complains that fraudulent mail ballots cost him a second term in 2020, has voting by mail become a key component of each party’s strategy to maximize voter turnout in 2024. Now Republicans, including Trump in some cases, see it as necessary for an election that will likely be decided by razor-thin margins in a handful of swing states. Republicans once voted by mail at least as often as Democrats, but Trump changed the dynamic in 2020 when he started to argue months before the voting started, they were against it.
Bryan Caskey, Kansas elections director and the association’s new president, asked Carter to consider a hypothetical jurisdiction with a 95% mail delivery rate, which he said is better than most other states.
“That still means that in the state that sends out 100,000 ballots, that’s 5,000 angry voters who are angry about the Postal Service,” Caskey said, adding: “The actual election is going to be determined by these delays, and I just want to make sure you hear why we’re so angry.”
“It’s completely understandable,” Carter said. “The frustration is understandable.”
The association’s current president, Mandy Vigil, New Mexico’s elections director, said in an interview afterward that she appreciated the agency’s willingness to at least engage with state officials, but that she worries there isn’t enough time before the general election.
“I think we’re at a point where we really need them to pay attention,” Vigil said. “You know, we’ve been raising concerns since November of last year. But we’re just not seeing the changes as we go through our primaries. And come November, we need to see a difference.”
Nineteen senators wrote to DeJoy last month asking the postmaster general about the agency’s policies and plans as it prepares for the 2024 election cycle. They pointed to how the first regional consolidation in Virginia last year led to delivery delays, leading some local election officials there to order residents to skip the mail and drop their primary ballots in designated drop boxes. They noted that Virginia’s on-time delivery rate fell below 72% for fiscal year 2024, or more than 15% below the national average.
Other consolidations have been blamed for service declines in Oregon, Virginia, Texas and Missouri. The consolidation has also raised concerns among Utah lawmakers, where state law requires ballots to be mailed from Utah, the Postal Service is now processing mail from some Nevada counties after moving some operations from Provo to Las Vegas. The entire congressional delegations of Minnesota and North Dakota wrote to DeLoy last month after an inspector general audit documented nearly 131,000 missing or delayed pieces of mail at six post offices over the course of just two days.
DeJoy has suspended the cost-saving consolidations until January 2025, after bipartisan criticism. But lawmakers want a commitment that the resumption will not lead to further delivery delays.