Postal Service Is Ordered by Judge to Search for Remaining Ballots
Tens of thousands of ballots were caught up in the U.S. mail system; some may be too late to be counted for election
A federal judge ordered the U.S. Postal Service to conduct rigorous sweeps of postal facilities serving states with looming election deadlines like Pennsylvania and North Carolina, so any ballots still in the mail system reach election officials in time to be included in election tallies.
The order came in the midst of a close presidential race and as the Postal Service submitted data to a federal court in Washington, D.C., showing that at least 150,000 ballots likely reached election officials on Wednesday—too late to meet deadlines for inclusion in election counts in as many as 28 states.
More than 600 of those ballots were processed in postal facilities serving Georgia, where President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden’s vote tallies were extremely close, potentially making them too late for the state’s Election Day deadline. About 1,000 more were in other close states with Election Day deadlines, such as Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Around 15% of the ballots handled Wednesday at mail facilities servicing competitive states with Tuesday deadlines failed to meet Postal Service delivery on-time standards, which typically range between one and three business days for most first-class mail, the data show.
Meanwhile, more than 10,000 ballots were processed Wednesday in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Nevada, the Postal Service data show, where they can still be counted. Nevada, for example, allows mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day and received by election officials by Nov. 10 to be included in tallies.
It was impossible to say, based on the data released by the Postal Service on Thursday, how many races in how many states might have been affected by the late ballot deliveries.
The overall uncertainty casts a shadow over the handling of election mail by the Postal Service, which told the court and other federal courts that it was pulling out all the stops to speed election deliveries to its destinations in a year that saw record voting by mail.
During a hearing on Thursday before U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, attorneys for public interest groups including Vote Forward and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People asked the Postal Service to provide additional information on how it handled election mail and to explain why it lost visibility into thousands of ballots.
Lawyers representing the groups estimated—using data provided by the Postal Service—that somewhere between 8,000 to 9,000 ballots nationwide were mailed by Sunday but not delivered by Election Day.
The groups sued the Postal Service in Washington, D.C., federal court earlier this year. They accused the newly hired Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a big donor to President Trump, of implementing changes in postal operations that, they said, posed a threat to voting by mail.
In testimony earlier this week, the Postal Service described special procedures it put in place to bypass normal mail handling and speed ballots to election officials. That meant, it said, that roughly 300,000 ballots entered the usual mail stream but were then handled differently from regular mail to eliminate delays.
But that special handling created challenges, with the Postal Service losing the ability to track the ballots as they moved through—or around—the mail-processing machines to final delivery points with election officials.
After questions were raised in federal court by the civil rights groups, Postal Service officials reviewed the agency’s internal data and said they had high confidence that many of those 300,000 ballots were delivered but some warranted further investigation.
In some cases, the Postal Service said it couldn’t say with confidence that all of the ballots given special handling were actually delivered. For example, it said 1,524 ballots destined for election officials in central Pennsylvania received initial scans in that same area but the Postal Service couldn’t say with certainty that 545 of them had been delivered.
That doesn’t mean they weren’t delivered, only that the Postal Service’s internal tracking system couldn’t definitively account for where they ended up.
It was the same situation in Greensboro, N.C., where the Postal Service said it lost track of 1,335 of 3,087 ballots that had been scanned. For Philadelphia, it said it wasn’t certain about the final destination of 814 ballots.
The Postal Service said it needs to do additional analysis to better understand how each postal plant handled the process.
In effect, the Postal Service’s attempt to use extraordinary means to get the mail out had the result of “making its numbers look bad,” said Joseph Borson, an attorney for the Department of Justice who is defending the Postal Service in the lawsuits.
Judge Sullivan ordered the special sweeps in all states with pending ballot deadlines after the Postal Service failed to follow his court order on Tuesday to sweep mail-processing facilities for any ballots before polling places closed.
The Postal Service said it was unable to adhere to the deadline because it couldn’t change the work schedules and duties of approximately 1,300 postal inspectors. It said it needed up to five people per shift to conduct the sweeps and did them later that day, but sometimes finished after polls had closed.
Union officials who represent postal police officers said it had scores of uniformed officers inside many facilities who could easily have assisted the sweeps under the timeline laid out by the court. Union officials said the officers were told not to help even though the court order specified actions were to be taken by inspectors or their “designees.”
For example, the Postal Police Officers Association said it had officers inside mail-sorting facilities in some battleground states at the time the sweeps were mandated, including eight in the Pittsburgh mail-processing plant, eight in the Philadelphia plant, 10 officers inside the Atlanta plant and four officers on duty at the Cleveland plant.
A spokesman for the Postal Service said inspectors were specially trained to do the sweeps, not the officers. He declined to elaborate.