Election Officials Urge USPS to Fix Mail Delivery Issues That Could Impact Voting
Election officials across the country are urging the United States Postal Service (USPS) to fix what they’ve identified as significant issues with mail delivery that could impact voting in the Nov. 5 election.
The National Associations of Secretaries of State (NASS) and State Election Directors (NASED) sent a joint letter Wednesday to U.S. Postal Service Postmaster Louis DeJoy on behalf of state, territorial, and local election officials, expressing concerns about election mail service.
Over the past year, the letter said, election officials have flagged a host of issues including lost or delayed mail and “training deficiencies impacting USPS’s ability to deliver election mail in a timely and accurate manner.”
Officials also raised concerns over a reported uptick in mail that’s delivered to voters being marked as undeliverable, “even in cases where a voter is known not to have moved.” This is particularly concerning because “election mail returned to an election office as undeliverable could initiate the voter registration list maintenance process consistent with the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993.”
“As a result,” the letter said, “a voter may be moved to the inactive voter registration list and could be required to take additional action to verify their address to participate in the election.”
The letter urges USPS to take immediate action to address the “ongoing performance issues” with USPS’s mail delivery.
USPS has been under scrutiny over the past year due to its issues with mail processing and delivery. In August, the postal service scrapped plans to move its Reno mail processing operations to Sacramento, Calif., after a northern Nevada county sued the mail carrier over the decision.
The initial decision to relocate stems from a broader plan from DeJoy to reduce the number of facilities in the U.S. But that plan has been criticized by some lawmakers for resulting in mail delays.
Additionally, the processing of mail-in ballots can directly impact the outcome of races and lead to litigation over the results. In Utah, for example, Republican House candidate Colby Jenkins lost his bid to count mail-in ballots he alleged were wrongly excluded from the vote total in the state’s primary for the 2nd Congressional District.
Jenkins claimed many of the rejected ballots were in fact mailed before Election Day, but weren’t postmarked because of variations in the postal service’s practice for processing mail from different regions.