US Postal Service touts timely delivery of mail ballots despite concerns from election officials

The US Postal Service said Monday that nearly 100% of completed ballots had been returned to election offices within a week for this year’s presidential election, despite hurricanes, misdirected election mail and delivery concerns from state officials.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said postal workers processed more than 99 million ballots for the general election, making additional deliveries and collections and identifying problems that could lead to incorrect deliveries. They also made sure the ballots were delivered even afterward hurricanes brought destruction to parts of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina just weeks before Election Day, he said.

Nearly 99.9% of general election ballots were delivered to election officials within a week and 97.7% of those were delivered within three days, postal officials said. The three-day return rate was similar to 2020, but slightly lower than the rate during the 2022 midterm elections.

There were some notable issues even with the overall strong performance.

Election offices in California, Montana, Louisiana, New Mexico and elsewhere reported receiving completed ballots in the mail that should have gone to other states. For example, the California secretary of state’s office said about 150 ballots from Oregon voters were incorrectly sent to California before being returned. The Postal Service report did not address these issues.

State elections officials warned Prior to the elections, problems with the country’s postal delivery system threatened to arise disenfranchise voters after problems surfaced during preseason. At the time, some mail-in ballots were postmarked on time but were received too late to be counted, and some properly addressed ballots were returned as undeliverable.

The criticism came when the postal service a review of its activitiesincluding opening major mail processing centers, but some of these changes were put on hold to ensure they would not disrupt this year’s elections. The Postal Service said it has also implemented several “extraordinary measures” to speed up the processing of ballots in the weeks leading up to the final day of voting on November 5.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, and New Mexico Election Director Mandy Vigil, president of the National Association of State Election Directors, said they look forward to working with officials from the postal service to improve performance for the future. elections.

But Vigil raised concerns about longer-term issues, especially staff training and operations at the processing facilities.

“We look forward to working with USPS in the coming year to improve the reliability of election mail for elections in 2025 and 2026, when no extraordinary measures are in place,” she said in a statement.

Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, said postal workers delivered at the same rate as they did during the pandemic in 2020.

“And once again, the USPS created a high standard to ensure ballots were delivered both on time and safely, including quickly addressing the few issues as they arose,” he said.