USPS will go to ‘heroic’ lengths to deliver mail-in ballots on time, DeJoy tells lawmakers

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is telling lawmakers the Postal Service is ready to handle a high volume of mail-in ballots ahead of Election Day.

DeJoy told members of the House Appropriations Committee on Thursday that USPS has a “track record of success” delivering ballots.

In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, USPS delivered 99.89% of ballots from voters to election officials within seven days.

That year, when USPS delivered a “historically high number of ballots,” DeJoy said they accounted for just 0.1% of its annual mail volume.

“We will be even better prepared for 2024,” DeJoy said. “Our network is designed to readily handle a surge in mail volume, just like we do every election and holiday season.”

Extraordinary measures

USPS, as it does ahead of every election, will deploy “extraordinary measures,” which include advancing election mail ahead of other mail during processing, running extra truck trips between facilities and daily “all clear” checks to ensure all election mail is accounted for in the system.

DeJoy said those extraordinary measures are also meant to “rescue ballots” mailed late, and that wouldn’t otherwise get to election officials on time.

“They represent a deviation from normal mail flow and processing, meaning they won’t run through our plants and processing machines as mail normally would,” DeJoy said.

“We engage in these heroic efforts to beat the clock, and they are only used when the risk inherent from deviating from our standard processes is justified by a risk of a voter’s ballot not meeting a state’s election deadline. In those instances, we prioritize expeditious delivery,” he added.

The vast majority of election mail is collected and delivered locally and doesn’t travel extensively through the USPS network.

“We don’t even bring ballots back to the plant, if they’re picked up from the collection box,” DeJoy said. “Ballots that are brought into the post office, we separate them, we hand-stamp them. “If they’re local, and they go right back to the election officials.”

“Our people see ballots, they dive on them,” he added.

‘Good target for a lot of blame’

While USPS holds regular meetings with election officials, DeJoy stressed that the agency doesn’t have a say in when election officials mail ballots out to voters or set deadlines.

“There are 50 states and thousands of election jurisdictions that are far from uniform in their election laws and practices, and that often don’t consider how the mail system works,” he said.

Election officials also oversee the printing and design of ballots.

DeJoy said USPS sometimes gets ballots with wrong addresses on them, or ballots that can’t be run through its mail sorting machines.

“We’re a good target for a lot of blame,” he said.

Some states put an intelligent mail barcode on their ballots, which allows for the tracking of ballots throughout the delivery process.

While these barcodes aren’t required by law, DeJoy said they provide a level of standardization that makes it easier for USPS to deliver ballots.

“If every election board did that, if every state did that, we’d have a whole lot easier job making sure that we perform at that at that high level,” DeJoy said.

Former House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) introduced a bill in 2022 that would require intelligent mail barcodes on ballots.

“Four years ago, six years ago, that was not something that would have got any traction in the Congress,” DeJoy said. “It costs money. Election boards don’t have a lot of money, right? Somebody’s got to pay for it. I don’t have a lot of money. We have to come up with a methodology, but that would get at what you want.”

DeJoy said the USPS Board of Governors has discussed the possibility of offering a national contract to election boards, to “define what everything looks like” on a mail-in ballot, from the barcode to the paper it’s printed on.

“We expect perfection in an imperfect system. And if we want that perfection, we’re all in,” he said.

Lawmakers during the hearing expressed frustration with USPS network modernization.

Subcommittee Chairman David Joyce (R-Ohio) said reduced mail routes and rising delivery costs “are frustrating customers and businesses alike.”

Members of the subcommittee, he added, are hearing from constituents about “declining standards at the Postal Service.”

“Unfortunately, many of these changes have served to further erode public confidence in the U.S. Postal Service,” Joyce said.

USPS saw regional drops in on-time mail delivery in areas where it opened massive new mail processing, called Regional Processing and Distribution Centers.

DeJoy told lawmakers that “we do have some operational implementation delays,” but that those issues won’t impact the election.

However, the agency is putting some of its network modernization changes on hold until at least January 2025.

“Right now, we will not even put a machine in for maintenance without me signing off on it, not necessarily because it’s going to impact the mail — because we’re trying to calm everybody down,” DeJoy said.

In a recent letter to the National Association of State Election Directors and the National Association of Secretaries of State, said recent shakeups from USPS network modernization “will not have an impact on Election Mail, and we have committed to limit network changes to avoid any unintended disruption in service for the upcoming election and peak season.”

“Our goal is to do what we have done before, in elections throughout the nation, to perform highly admirably,” DeJoy told lawmakers.

“We’re doing very well at this. Just not perfect,” he added.

The groups told USPS in a letter that over the past year, including this year’s primary elections, local election offices received mailed ballots days after the deadline to be counted — even though they were postmarked on time.

“We are proactive, but we need to be more proactive and not just wait for issues to come to us, to have dialog with these people, but to be proactive, and express and build confidence,” DeJoy said.

While USPS is putting some of its network modernization changes on hold, DeJoy stressed that his plans are necessary to reform an agency with more than a decade of severe net losses, as well as facilities in need of upgrades.

“I walk in our plants and facilities, I see horror. My employees see just another day at work, over the last 15 years,” DeJoy said.

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