State and local election officials across the country warned Wednesday that problems with the U.S. mail delivery system could disenfranchise voters in the upcoming presidential election, telling the head of the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) that deep-rooted flaws have not been fixed.
In their letter, officials said that over the past year, including the just-concluded primary season, mail-in ballots that were postmarked on time arrived at local elections offices days after the deadline for counting.
They also noticed that properly addressed election mail was being returned as undeliverable.
Multiple attempts to contact USPS to resolve the issue have been unsuccessful, the official added.
“We have not seen any concerted effort to make improvements or remedy the concerns,” the letter states. “Indeed, many of the issues raised by election officials are reflected in the findings of a recent investigation by the USPS Office of Inspector General into the state of election mail readiness for the 2024 general election.”
The letter, addressed to U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, came from two groups representing top election officials from all 50 states.
A message seeking a response from USPS was not immediately returned.
Two groups, the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of State Election Officials, said local election officials in “nearly every state” were receiving postmarked ballots on time after Election Day, even after the US Postal Service’s standard three to five business days for first-class mail.
The letter comes less than two weeks after DeJoy said in an interview that the U.S. Postal Service is prepared to handle the large volume of mail-in ballots expected in this year’s election, and comes as Donald Trump continues to sow doubt about U.S. elections by falsely claiming he won the 2020 election.
That year, in the midst of a global pandemic, election officials reported sending out more than 69 million ballots by mail, a significant increase from four years earlier.
Both Democrats and Republicans have launched efforts to encourage their supporters to vote in person or by mail and “bank” their votes before Election Day on November 5.
Mail-in ballot requests in Florida fell by 50% in 2024 compared to the 2022 midterm elections after the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed a law in 2021 canceling all current mail-in ballot requests after the 2022 midterm elections.
USPS officials told reporters last month that in 2020, nearly 98% of ballots were returned to election officials within three days, and that figure is nearly 99% in 2022. DeJoy said he wants to get closer to 100% this election cycle, and argued that the USPS is better equipped to process ballots than it was in 2020.
But local state officials have criticized the USPS for years for consolidating its mail processing centers, and the agency plans to further slow rural and long-distance mail delivery after the 2024 election.
The Save the Post Office coalition, an alliance of more than 300 organizations including the ACLU, Public Citizen, the NAACP and the American Postal Workers Union, is calling on Congress to pass the Election Mail Act, authored by Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Georgia Rep. Nikema Williams, to improve the security of election mail delivery and tracking. The bill has yet to reach a vote in the House or Senate.
“Congress should establish a national standard for voting by mail so that everyone can be confident that their vote will be counted, regardless of their zip code or how they voted,” Williams said in a press release reintroducing the bill in 2023.
In their letters, election officials warned that any election mail returned to election offices as undeliverable may trigger a process required by federal law to maintain accurate rolls of registered voters, meaning voters could be moved to “inactive” status and asked to update their address in order to participate in elections.
Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab also sent a letter to Governor DeJoy this week saying that about 1,000 ballots from the state’s August primary election couldn’t be counted because they arrived too late or weren’t postmarked, and that more are continuing to be counted.
Schwab and other Kansas election officials also said some ballots arrived on time but were not postmarked and therefore would not be counted under Kansas law. Schwab told DeJoy that local postal workers had informed election officials that ballots cannot be postmarked later, even if it was clear the postal service handled them before the mail-in deadline.
Kansas counts ballots postmarked on or before Election Day if they arrive within three days. The Republican-controlled Legislature instituted the grace period in 2017 amid concerns that mail delivery was slowed after the Postal Service closed seven mail-processing centers in the state and outsourced processing to centers outside the state.
In their letter Wednesday, election officials also said colleagues across the country had reported that Postal Service employees, from managers to letter carriers, were not informed of policies for handling election-related mail, received inconsistent instructions and were misdelivering ballots.
“State and local election officials need a committed partner like the USPS, and we urge you to take immediate, concrete corrective steps to address the ongoing performance issues with USPS election mail services,” the officials concluded. “Failure to do so risks limiting voter participation and confidence in the election process.”
The Associated Press contributed reporting