The Postal Service's Ballot Sprint: Extra Staff, Sunday Sweeps and a Record 4.2 Billion Pieces of Political Mail Before Tuesday
Tens of millions of ballots have moved through the mail in two months. In the final hours, postal workers are sweeping every facility - sometimes several times a day - for the ones still left.
From longer hours and extra staffing to special lines in its branches, the US Postal Service is taking an array of special actions to make sure mail-in ballots for the midterm elections are counted on Tuesday, Reuters reported. In the last two months, the Postal Service has delivered tens of millions of ballots and a record 4.2 billion pieces of political marketing mail - the flyers that prod voters to support or oppose a candidate or ballot measure - up more than 300 million pieces over the 2024 election cycle.
The pressure is higher than usual. President Donald Trump ordered the agency to write rules that would bar it from delivering ballots if states did not agree to turn over lists of eligible voters, and some voters expressed concern about voting by mail; the Supreme Court blocked Trump and the Postal Service from enforcing those rules in September. Thousands of postal workers are handling the final ballots before Tuesday's election. Some branches may extend hours and establish a Ballot Postmark Only line at retail counters or a drive-through Ballot Mail option, and the service is conducting expedited handling, extra deliveries and special pickups of ballots, with daily - and sometimes multiple - sweeps of all postal facilities in the final days to search for any remaining ballots. On Sunday it brought on extra staff to collect, postmark and process mail to expedite ballot deliveries.
Amber McReynolds, chair of the Postal Service Board of Governors, said voting by mail seemed to be a little higher than in prior midterm elections in part because ballots went out earlier in some states. The Postal Service has been delivering ballots since the Civil War, at the direction of President Abraham Lincoln. McReynolds said the service has done it in a cross-partisan, nonpartisan, apolitical way and will continue to operate that way, describing its workers as delivering democracy. In 2024, the service delivered 99.2 million ballots to and from voters in the presidential election; about 30 percent of votes were cast by mail that year, down from 46 percent in 2020.
The sprint is local as much as national. In Golden, Colorado, acting postmaster John Douglas has been getting to work at 4 a.m. to make sure ballots are delivered, saying the goal is to get everything home, into the right hands; about 20 miles away, the million-square-foot Denver processing center handled 3.5 million pieces of political marketing mail on a single day last week. On Election Day, workers will make extra trips to postal facilities to collect the last ballots, or drive directly to collect ballots in hand. Travis County expects to process roughly 30,000 mail ballots this election, local reporting has noted. Travis voters who still hold a mail ballot on Monday should follow the Travis County Clerk's Election Day guidance for returning it in time to count - at this hour, the surest ballot is a hand-delivered one.
