Since the 2020 Covid vote, the USPS has properly be the largest “precinct” in our votes with little citizen study. However, recent events, information from the USPS Office of the Inspector General, and separate investigations have revealed that the USPS may not be able to control the amount of mail-based vote in November.
The USPS Election Mail structure, as previously reported in The Federalist, appeared to have caused a significant issue with Utah’s primary election in June. According to local election officials, thousands of votes that were apparently mailed before the vote-by-mail cut-off were not processed by USPS in time to meet the “postmark” date, making those vote ineligible to get counted in the poll.  ,
The USPS Election Mail system has a problem that needs to be addressed across the country, as demonstrated by this incident in Utah.
In 2021, the USPS announced its” Delivering for America” program, a “ten-year plan” that aims to restructure the flow of mail” to achieve financial sustainability and service excellence”. After three years, the program has reportedly reduced costs. However, in many areas where the restructuring was implemented, there seem to have been some dramatic decreases in service. This decline is likely to be caused by two programs.  ,
Regional Processing Centers
The USPS is currently coordinating its regional mail processing centers, according to the first point. Large portions of multiple neighboring states are present in many of these regions. ( Grassroots activists at Save the Post Office plotted the names of the regional processing and distribution centers on a map in this case. ) Although there are strict requirements in most states for ballots to be mailed and processed by a specific deadline, the Postal Service’s “policy is to postmark all ballots mailed by voters” is true. USPS processing equipment is the only way to apply these postmarks to Election Mail. Voting-by-mail ballot envelopes are processed at a USPS regional center in many cases, which results in the processing of ballots from one state to a center in another, neighboring state.  ,
Votes that were reportedly delivered on time in Utah were likely to be delivered to the Las Vegas, Nevada USPS regional center the closest, according to the vote-by-mail mix-up. Election officials speculated that many of the ballots were likely postmarked after the deadline, making them ineligible to be counted in the primary election because it took a day to travel the 340 miles from southern Utah to Las Vegas and back.  ,
In the upcoming November election, there might be similar significant turbulence.
Ballots Delayed at Local Post Offices
The second element is a new initiative established per the project’s goal of “redesign]ing ] surface transportation network”. By making more efficiently processable loads, this” Local Transportation Optimization initiative” ( LTO ) aims to “reduce the overall number of transportation trips between sorting facilities and delivery units,” but at least in Richmond, Virginia, where the initiative was first implemented, this meant that mail was stored at delivery units after it was” collected” This causes a system that is already experiencing service issues to experience additional delays.  ,
The U.S. Postal Service Office of the Inspector General’s analysis of LTO operations in Richmond revealed the problems with this new procedure in an April audit report. Although the audit did not “isolate the service impact of Local Transportation Optimization,” findings in the report did indicate that” service performance significantly decreased in the weeks following implementation.”
Although the peak mailing season ended in January, the report continued, but service performance was still below average for all mail classes during that time last year.
How the initiative’s projected effects on Election Mail were also covered in the Richmond LTO report. According to the report, the USPS “provide]d ] instructions in February 2024 on how the affected sites in the Richmond region should handle Election Mail”. Per this guidance, vote-by-mail ballots are to “remain at facilities overnight unless it is within four days of the election”. Local management will collect any ballots received that day in the four days leading up to and including the Election Day processing deadline in the evening and deliver them to a hub for processing instead of letting them stay overnight.
As of April, the USPS had not yet produced a “documented national policy on how to handle election mail and ballots at post offices affected by]LTO,” despite USPS officials ‘ claim that the initiative “did not anticipate the delivery of ballot mail” at locations where LTO was implemented.
Since it was initially launched, the initiative has been rolled out in other locations. It’s simple to see how the practice and the lack of “documented national” guidance regarding Election Mail could cause the same issues for voters all over the country, regardless of whether the LTO initiative contributed to the Utah mail ballot fiasco.
Researching the Problems
The” Delivering for America” program has been the subject of inquiries and href=”https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2024-04/23-161-r24.pdf” target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>reports from the USPS Inspector General. The plan’s “pilot” location was the Richmond Regional Center. The Office of the Inspector General conducted an investigation into the rollout in 2023, and a critical href=”https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2024-04/23-161-r24.pdf” target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>report on Richmond operations was released in March. With the second href=”https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2024-04/23-161-r24.pdf” target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>report coming out in April, the USPS inspector general’s office continued to look into significant issues with Richmond’s” Delivering for America” LTO initiative, issues that, as previously mentioned, could have a significant impact on the fall election.
Both reports mention how the USPS was “handling Election Mail for local elections” while” simultaneously” implementing LTO and “making changes” to the regional processing and distribution centers.
The problems with” Delivering for America” only add to the many flaws that citizen researchers like myself have raised concerns about in the USPS Election Mail system, despite the USPS’s lack of transparency.
For example, the USPS does not have the same ballot” chain of custody” as those required in every election precinct. Due to the complexity of a mass mail system, it is challenging if not impossible to accurately track how many ballots are delivered to voters, how many are undeliverable and returned to the election office, or how many are misdirected or misdelivered because the USPS receives trays of ballots from election offices. Much more difficult than when ballots change hands in a physical voting precinct, “reconciliation” or” tracking” is used to determine how many ballots actually made it into voters ‘ hands rather than just to a mailbox.
Programs like the Postal Service’s” Package Intercept” also raise questions about mail ballot procedures. Undeliverable ballots are typically returned to the election office and not to a new address. For example, Davis County, Utah, promises voters that” A ballot will never be forwarded by the Postal Service”. However, most “mailings with a tracking or extra services barcode” are eligible for the” Package Intercept” service, by which a person can log into USPS and redirect the mailing for a fee. Anyone with a scanner can typically identify the barcodes that are typically printed on vote-by-mail ballot envelopes.  ,
Our elections should be secure, not convenient. Since and before the 2020 Covid election, voters in several states that mail a ballot to every name on the voter rolls — whether the voter is dead or alive, has moved, etc. — have embraced the ease of sending mail ballots.  ,
But the many issues with the USPS Election Mail system, and the total lack of citizen observation, make it impossible for the USPS, practically the largest precinct in our elections, to be the efficient and lawful caretaker of millions of vote-by-mail ballots.
The Election Integrity Network’s Citizens Election Research Center is led by Ned Jones. He has been researching election processes, including the USPS Election Mail System since the 2020 Election.
