Postmaster General claims USPS is prepared for a flood of mail-in ballots

In a letter released Monday, U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy assured state election officials that he would work with them to address their warnings about problems delivering election mail during the primary, while stressing that the Postal Service would be prepared for the flood of mail-in ballots ahead of the November election.

He said the Postal Service has already addressed most of the concerns raised by election officials, who have pointed out that properly addressed absentee ballots are being returned — a problem that can cause voters to automatically be placed in inactive status — and that mail-in ballots, while postmarked on time, arrive after polls close.

DeJoy said training for postal workers was already being ramped up and that the Postal Service was already in constant contact with election officials and would work with them to fix quality issues that led to incorrect deliveries or mail being returned to sender. He also said he would work with them to avoid a repeat of “flawed ballot envelope designs,” although many envelopes had already been designed and printed, officials said.

REGARD: Election official raises concerns about USPS's ability to process mail-in ballots

The Postal Service also has teams dedicated to dealing with mail marked “undeliverable” or any other problem that may arise related to election mail, DeJoy wrote.

The concerns were raised by the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of State Election Directors, even as former President Donald Trump continues to falsely claim he won in 2020 and exploit mail delivery problems to sow doubt about the upcoming election. On Sunday, he reiterated his claim on social media that the Postal Service was not up to the task.

In 2020, amid the coronavirus pandemic, election officials said they sent out just over 69 million ballots by mail, a significant increase from four years earlier.

Although the number of voters may be smaller this year, many voters have embraced and trusted mail-in voting. And both Democrats and Republicans have made efforts to encourage their voters to vote early, either in person or by mail, to “save” their votes before Election Day on November 5. One sign of how quickly Election Day is approaching is that the first mail-in ballots were mailed to absentee voters in Alabama last week.

Steve Simon, president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, maintained Monday that the Postal Service had been slow to respond to concerns, saying local problems could be easily resolved but “larger problems still remain.”

“If the country's election officials felt that these issues had been adequately discussed with USPS staff last year, then there would have been no need” for the voting groups to raise their concerns last week, he said.

Mandy Vigil, president of the National Association of State Election Directors, agreed that “the issues we raised have not been adequately addressed in the run-up to the November election.”

In his response, DeJoy acknowledged that a major restructuring of the network had caused temporary problems, but assured the two bipartisan voting groups that the changes would now be limited to avoid delaying election mail before the November election.

He said the postal service's performance in past elections speaks for itself.

Postal Service officials said that in the last presidential election – at the height of the pandemic in 2020 – nearly 98% of ballots were returned to election officials within three days and that 99.9% of ballots were delivered within seven days.

“As previous elections have demonstrated time and again, the performance of the Election Mail regularly exceeds our regular service level due to our long-standing processes and procedures,” DeJoy wrote.

The average delivery time for first-class mail is currently 2.7 days, DeJoy said, although the two groups wrote in a letter last week that some poll workers did not receive their postmarked ballots until after Election Day and outside the three- to five-business-day deadline set by the Postal Service as the standard for first-class mail.

Still, DeJoy said voters should not hesitate to cast their mail-in ballots this election season. Both the postal service and state election officials are urging all mail-in voters to drop off their materials well in advance of Election Day or use drop boxes where available.

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Associated Press writers Christina A. Cassidy in Atlanta and John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas, contributed to this report.