Anticipating an avalanche of absentee ballots, the U.S. Postal Service recently sent detailed letters to 46 states and the District of Columbia warning that it cannot guarantee that all ballots cast by mail in the November election will arrive in time to be counted -- adding another layer of uncertainty ahead of the high-stakes presidential contest.
The letters sketch a grim possibility for the tens of millions of Americans eligible to cast mail-in ballots this fall. Even if people follow all of their state's election rules, the pace of Postal Service delivery may mean their ballots will arrive too late to be counted.
The Postal Service's warnings of potential disenfranchisement came as the agency undergoes an organizational and policy overhaul amid dire financial conditions. Cost-cutting moves have already delayed mail delivery by as much as a week in some places, and a new decision to decommission 10% of the Postal Service's sorting machines sparked widespread concern that the slowdowns will only worsen.
The ballot warnings, issued at the end of July from Thomas J. Marshall, general counsel and executive vice president of the Postal Service, and obtained through a records request by The Washington Post, were planned before the appointment of Louis DeJoy, a former logistics executive, as postmaster general in early summer.
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They go beyond the traditional coordination between the Postal Service and election officials, drafted as fears surrounding the coronavirus pandemic triggered an unprecedented and sudden shift to mail-in voting.
Some states anticipate 10 times the normal volume of election mail. Six states and Washington, D.C., received warnings that ballots could be delayed for a narrow set of voters.
But the Postal Service gave 40 others -- including the key battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida -- more serious warnings that their long-standing deadlines for requesting, returning or counting ballots were "incongruous" with mail service and that voters who send ballots in close to those deadlines may become disenfranchised.
"The Postal Service is asking election officials and voters to realistically consider how the mail works," Martha Johnson, a spokeswoman for the USPS, said in a statement.
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MOVED DEADLINES
In response to the Postal Service's warnings, a few states have quickly moved deadlines -- forcing voters to request or cast ballots earlier, or deciding to delay tabulating results while waiting for more ballots to arrive.
Pennsylvania election officials cited its letter late Thursday in asking the state's Supreme Court for permission to count ballots delivered three days after Election Day. But deadlines in many other states have not been or cannot be adjusted with just weeks remaining before the first absentee ballots hit the mail stream.
More than 60 lawsuits in at least two dozen states over the mechanics of mail-in voting are wending their way through the courts.
Trump has claimed that mail ballots can lead to voter fraud. This week, he said he opposes emergency funding for the agency -- which has repeatedly requested more resources -- because of Democratic efforts to expand mail voting.
At the same time, his own absentee ballot to vote in Florida's primary election Tuesday was en route to Mar-a-Lago. According to the Palm Beach County elections website, the president and first lady Melania Trump both requested absentee ballots Wednesday.
Trump has voted absentee at least twice before.
White House Deputy Press Secretary Judd Deere told CNN that Trump is in favor of absentee voting but not universal mail-in voting.
The president has also argued that absentee ballots are substantially different from voting by mail.
"Absentee ballots, by the way, are fine," Trump told reporters Thursday. "But the universal mail-ins that are just sent all over the place, where people can grab them and grab stacks of them, and sign them and do whatever you want, that's the thing we're against."
SUPPRESSION FEARS
The Postal Service's structural upheaval alone has led experts and lawmakers from both parties to worry about timely delivery of prescription medications and Social Security checks, as well as ballots.
"The slowdown is another tool in the toolbox of voter suppression," said Celina Stewart, senior director of advocacy and litigation with the nonpartisan League of Women Voters. "That's no secret. We do think this is a voter-suppression tactic."
Even without the emergency funding that Trump vowed to block, postal workers can handle the country's mail-in ballots with proper planning, the head of their union said.
"Piece of cake for postal workers," said Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union.
Johnson, the USPS spokeswoman, also said the agency "is well prepared and has ample capacity to deliver America's election mail."
The letters to states detailing concerns for November followed ramped-up vote-by-mail primaries marred by delivery problems. It "presented a need to ensure the Postal Service's recommendations were reemphasized to elections officials," Johnson said.
In New York City, for example, a 17-fold increase in mail-in ballots left results of a June congressional primary race in doubt for six weeks. During court wrangling over it, USPS workers said election officials had dropped off 34,000 blank absentee ballots at a Brooklyn processing center on the day before the election, leaving postal workers scrambling to deliver them overnight.
Some voters received ballots after the election, and tens of thousands of voted ballots were initially thrown out because of delayed receipt.
The letters warning about November caution many states that their deadlines for voters to request absentee ballots are too close to Election Day and that "the Postal Service cannot adjust its delivery standards to accommodate the requirements of state election law." The letters put the onus on election officials to adjust deadlines or educate voters to act well before them.
Mail carriers, meanwhile, have warned that new cost-cutting measures at the USPS are slowing the delivery of mail ballots in key states. Recent contests have offered a preview of the potential consequences, with voters complaining that their absentee ballots did not arrive until the last minute or at all.
The problems predate the cost-cutting measures -- a late returned ballot was the chief reason absentee or mail ballots were disqualified during the 2016 election, according to Election Assistance Commission data submitted to Congress.
HAND DELIVERY
But the onslaught of vote-by-mail ballots, driven by directives to stay at home and practice social distancing during the pandemic, has increased the volume of delays this year.
In D.C.'s early-June primary, elections officials drove around town hand-delivering ballots because the mail service was not quick enough. In Florida, 18,500 mailed ballots arrived too late to be counted during the March primary. Tens of thousands of late ballots in Pennsylvania were counted only after courts intervened.
Eighteen states and the District of Columbia have eased or expanded access to mail ballots during the pandemic, allowing voters to avoid potential exposure to the virus at polling places. These policy shifts have brought the number of Americans who are eligible to cast mail or absentee ballots in the general election to a historic high of nearly 180 million, roughly 97 million of whom will automatically receive absentee ballots or absentee ballot request forms in the mail, according to a tally by The Washington Post.
An analysis of the USPS letters to states reveals that the threat of ballot rejection because of missed delivery deadlines may be highest for voters in 40 states that received serious warnings. About 159.5 million registered voters live in those states.
According to the letters, the risk of disenfranchisement is greatest for voters who wait until close to Election Day to request or cast ballots. The letters advised 31 states that regardless of their deadlines, voters should mail ballots no later than Oct. 27 -- a week before Election Day -- if they want to guarantee that the ballots are counted.
A Postal Service official is already warning that Missourians who are using mail-in voting this year should return their ballots at least a week before the Nov. 3 general election.
Thomas Marshall, general counsel and executive vice president of the Postal Service, told Missouri's Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft in a letter July 31 that the service might not be able to get all ballots to election officials in time if they are mailed too close to Election Day.
Missouri law requires all mail-in ballots to arrive by 7 p.m. on Election Day for them to be counted.
DROP BOXES
Elections officials across the country are also installing drop boxes for completed ballots and encouraging voters to use them in lieu of the Postal Service.
The USPS did not offer serious warnings to the five states that have long conducted universal vote-by-mail elections -- Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington.
For Nevada, which Trump accused in May of trying to "cheat" in elections after it announced plans to conduct a statewide primary by mail, the USPS delivered a clean bill of health. The state plans to mail ballots to all active voters for the general election.
New Jersey will move to a nearly all-mail election this November following the model that the state used in its July primary, Gov. Phil Murphy said Friday.
Murphy, a Democrat, said during a news conference that he will sign an executive order calling for all registered voters to get ballots beginning Oct. 5 along with prepaid return envelopes.
To address concerns over the service's reliability, Murphy said voters will have several options to return their ballots: They can mail them, as long as they're postmarked by Election Day, or take them to at least 10 official drop boxes throughout each county, Murphy said.
There will be a new option for the fall, Murphy said: Voters can take their mail-in ballots in person to a polling place and hand deliver them to poll workers.
Ballots postmarked by Nov. 3 will be accepted up to a week later, Murphy said.
In-person voting won't look like it usually does.
Voters can either hand deliver their ballots, or vote by provisional ballot, which means the vote will be counted only after officials determined a mail-in ballot wasn't already cast.
On Friday, Republican state Sen. Michael Testa said the change will cause "chaos" in the fall.
"Allowing people to spend five or 10 minutes casting their ballots in person to protect the integrity of a presidential election doesn't seem like such a great risk," he said in a statement.
Separately, Sen. Mitt Romney said Friday that politicians attacking the vote by mail system are threatening global democracy. The United States must stand as an example to more fragile democratic nations to show that elections can be held in a free and fair manner, Romney said.
Romney said he has seen no evidence that voting by mail has led to fraud and that this voting method may be even more secure than electronic voting because it's less likely to invite hacking interference by foreign entities.
Information for this article was contributed by Erin Cox, Elise Viebeck, Jacob Bogage, Christopher Ingraham and Jada Yuan of The Washington Post; and by Mike Catalini and Sophia Eppolito of The Associated Press. Eppolito is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.