TOPEKA, Kan. – The head of the U.S. Postal Service expressed frustration Thursday with ongoing criticism by election officials of how it handles mail ballots while also seeking to reassure voters that it's ready to handle an expected crush of those ballots this fall.
U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told reporters that it's difficult for the Postal Service to address “generalities” about perceived problems and said some election officials don’t fully understand its efforts to deliver ballots in time to be counted.
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He said the service will collect and deliver mail ballots more frequently in the days before the Nov. 5 presidential election and would keep processing centers open the Sunday before Election Day. The Postal Service, he said, would take extraordinary measures to “rescue” ballots that are mailed late and at risk of missing state deadlines to be received by election offices.
Elections officials have said for weeks that they are concerned about the Postal Service's readiness. They've cited ballots arriving late or without the postmarks required by some state laws during the primary season.
"We engage in heroic efforts intended to beat the clock,” DeJoy told reporters during a virtual news conference.
"These efforts are designed to be used only when the risk of deviating from our standard processes is necessary to compensate for the ballot being mailed so close to a state’s deadline,” he added. “This is commonly misunderstood in the media and even by election officials.”
DeJoy and state and local election officials do agree on one thing: They are urging voters who want to use mail ballots to return them as early as possible and at least seven days before a state's deadline. DeJoy also encouraged voters to go to post office counters to get their ballots postmarked.
“I want to see high turnout and low drama,” Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat and the president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, said Thursday.
In 2020, amid the coronavirus pandemic, election officials reported sending just over 69 million ballots in the mail, a substantial increase from four years earlier.
While the numbers this year may be smaller, many voters have embraced mail voting and come to rely on it.
NASS and the National Association of State Election Directors told DeJoy in a letter last week that the Postal Service had not fixed persistent problems that could disenfranchise some voters.
“It's extremely troubling that the USPS dismissed our concerns about disenfranchising voters by failing to postmark and timely deliver ballots, rather than working with us to find solutions,” Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, a Republican and the past NASS president, said this week.
On Thursday, DeJoy cited a report from the Postal Service’s inspector general at the end of July saying about 98.2% of the 10.3 million ballots mailed to election officials from Dec. 1, 2023, through April 1, 2024, arrived on time. The Postal Service's standard for on-time delivery of first-class mail is three to five days, and DeJoy has said the average is 2.7 days.
Schwab has said about 1,000 mail ballots from the state's Aug. 6 primary election couldn't be counted because they arrived too late or were not postmarked.
In Lawrence, in northeastern Kansas, Jamie Miller discovered that her primary election ballot took more than three weeks to go from the mailbox outside her home to her local election office, only 3.4 miles away.
She filled it out and left it for her mail carrier on July 20, the morning after she received it. The ballot envelope was postmarked July 22 but didn't get to election officials until Aug. 12, three days after the deadline for counting it.
Miller, a 53-year-old disabled Army veteran, plans to vote in person in November.
“I’m not going to give another person the opportunity to silence my voice again,” she said. “And it definitely should not be silenced by my federal government.”
DeJoy told reporters that if postal workers see a “stray” ballot, “they jump on it," but the service's monitoring systems might miss it if it's handled outside normal processing.
He also noted the difficulty of keeping pace with vastly different state election laws, regarding everything from postmark requirements to deadlines for returning mailed ballots.
“To operate successfully and even legally, we must have consistent policies nationwide,” DeJoy said Thursday. “But there are 8,000 election jurisdictions and 50 states who are far from uniform in their election laws and practices.”
In Kansas' most populous county, Johnson County, in the Kansas City area, Election Commissioner Fred Sherman said it's probably unrealistic to expect that no ballots will arrive late or without postmarks.
But he added: “If it’s your ballot, it’s not acceptable.”
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Associated Press writer Steve Karnowski in St. Paul, Minnesota, contributed to this report.