Steve Karnowski, The Associated Press
11 minutes ago
Molly Woon, elections chief for the Oregon Secretary of State’s office, left, leads a panel discussion on voting by mail during the National Association of State Election Chiefs’ summer conference, Tuesday, July 23, 2024, in Minneapolis. She is joined by Steven Carter, manager of elections and government programs for the U.S. Postal Service. State elections chiefs across the country have expressed serious concerns to Carter that the postal system will not be able to handle the large volume of mail-in ballots expected in the November election. (AP Photo/Steve Karnowski)
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — State election officials across the U.S. expressed serious concerns to U.S. Postal Service officials Tuesday that the mail system will not be able to handle the large number of mail-in ballots expected in the November election.
Stephen Carter, the Postal Service’s manager of elections and government programs, tried to reassure executives at a meeting in Minneapolis that the service’s Office of Inspector General will release an Election Mail Report next week with “encouraging” performance figures so far this year.
“The data we’re seeing indicates improvements in the right direction,” Carter said at the National Association of State Election Officials conference. “And I think the OIG report is especially complimentary about the way we’re currently approaching elections.”
But state election officials stressed to Carter that they remain concerned that there will be too many ballots in time to be counted in November. Their concerns are based on past problems and the disruptive consolidation of postal facilities across the country, which Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has delayed until after the election.
Monica Evans, executive director of the District of Columbia Board of Elections, described how she didn’t receive a mail-in ballot for her own primary in June, but ended up voting in person instead.
“At last count, there were over 80 ballots that were mailed on time as early as May for the June 4 primary,” Evans said, noting that her office would have been able to accept them by June 14 but that they still arrived too late. “We followed up, and the only response we got was, ‘We don’t know what happened. We don’t know what happened.'”
Former President Donald Trump has baselessly complained that fraudulent mail-in ballots cost him his second term in 2020, but mail-in voting has become a key component of each party’s strategy to maximize voter turnout in 2024. Republicans, including Trump, now believe it is necessary for an election that is likely to be decided closely in a few battleground states. Republicans once voted by mail at least as much as Democrats, but that changed in 2020 when Trump began opposing mail-in voting months before the polls opened.
Brian Caskey, Kansas’ elections chief and the association’s president-elect, asked Carter to consider a hypothetical jurisdiction in which mail delivery was 95% on time, a figure he said would be better than nearly every state achieves.
“But in a state that’s sending out 100,000 ballots, that means there are 5,000 voters who are upset and angry at the postal service,” Caskey said, adding, “The actual election depends on these delays. I want you to hear exactly why we’re so angry.”
“That’s totally understandable,” Carter said. “It’s understandable that people would be frustrated.”
Mandy Vigil, the association’s current president and New Mexico’s chief elections official, said in an interview after the election that she appreciated the service’s willingness to at least negotiate with state officials, but was concerned about the lack of time before the general election.
“I think we’re in a situation where we really need to get them to take notice,” Vigil said. “You know, we’ve been expressing our concerns since last November, and we haven’t seen any change as the primaries have progressed. And then we should start seeing change in November.”
The 19 senators wrote the Postmaster General last month questioning the Postal Service’s policies and plans for the 2024 election cycle. They noted that Virginia’s first round of local consolidation last year caused delivery delays and led some local election officials to tell residents to place their primary ballots in designated drop boxes rather than by mail. They noted that Virginia’s 2024 delivery date compliance rate was below 72%, more than 15% below the national average.
Postal consolidation has been blamed for poor service in Oregon, Virginia, Texas and Missouri. Consolidation has also raised concerns among Utah lawmakers, where state law requires ballots to be mailed from within the state, but the postal service moved some operations from Provo to Las Vegas and now processes mail from several Nevada counties. The entire Minnesota and North Dakota congressional delegations sent a letter to Governor De Roy last month after an inspector general audit documented nearly 131,000 pieces of mail lost or delayed at six post offices in just two days.
Governor DeJoy suspended cost-saving consolidations until January 2025 following bipartisan criticism, but lawmakers want assurances that resuming them will not lead to further delays to deliveries.
