Mail-In Voters Could Face A New Obstacle This Midterm Season

Changes at the U.S. Postal Service are poised to make a known problem even worse, and it could affect thousands of voters in this year’s midterm elections.

Fourteen states — plus Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam and the Virgin Islands — have a grace period in which mail-in ballots can be counted after Election Day, as long as they’re postmarked on time, and many more states have similar accommodations for military and overseas voters.

But there’s a noteworthy problem that’s poised to get even worse, according to USPS: Mail can go a full day or more without receiving a postmark, and such delays “will become more common” thanks to cost-cutting efforts.

According to new language in the USPS Domestic Mail Manual that went into effect on Christmas Eve, postmark dates “do not necessarily represent either the place at which, or the date on which, the Postal Service first accepted possession of the mailpiece.”

“It is becoming more common that you’ll have some pieces [of mail] that won’t be postmarked that same day that they’re entered into the system,” Cathy Purcell, a spokesperson for the Postal Service, told HuffPost.

The discrepancy means voters who mail absentee ballots back to election officials close to Election Day risk being disenfranchised.

“The people that are going to be impacted are the ones that turn ballots in on the deadline,” Deak Kersey, deputy secretary and chief of staff to West Virginia Secretary of State Kris Warner, told HuffPost, referring to people who “stick it in the blue box at 9 a.m. on Election Day.”

Out of the approximately 47.6 million mailed ballots that were returned by voters for the 2024 general election, 584,463 were rejected, according to a report from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Of those, 17.8% — or about 100,000 ballots — were rejected for missing a state deadline. It’s unclear how many ballots were affected by a late postmark.

Given the popularity of mail-in voting — across party affiliation, location and demographics — the increasingly common lag between mail entering the system and it receiving a postmark could make a difference in close elections.

“I’m deeply concerned that USPS is doubling down on making it harder for Oregonians, especially rural Oregonians, to vote,” Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read told HuffPost in a statement. “We’re already taking action, providing updated guidance to make sure every legal vote gets counted, and we’ll continue to sound the alarm: This is a threat to Oregonians’ right to hold government accountable.”

“I am concerned about this, because this new rule may disenfranchise voters, because they might just drop [their ballot] off in the USPS system and not think about the whole postmark issue, that it’s going to be delayed a little bit more than in past years,” Jared DeMarinis, Maryland’s state administrator of elections, told HuffPost on Wednesday.

Like other election officials HuffPost spoke to, DeMarinis said his state — where over 800,000 people voted by mail in 2024 — would encourage voters to return ballots early or use state ballot dropboxes, which he said are secure, under constant surveillance and allow voters to avoid the mail system entirely. Almost all states with mail-in voting allow ballots to be returned directly to election officials, as well.

And any voter can also request a free manual postmark in person at retail USPS locations, to ensure that the postmark reflects the date the ballot entered the mailstream.

The Postal Service has said that its process for applying postmarks has not changed, and that it only pursued the new Domestic Mail Manual language to clarify longstanding realities — namely, that postmarks are generally applied by machines at centralized processing centers, not at public-facing retail locations.

But the agency is also undergoing a significant reorganization that it says will make the application of postmarks the day after mail is sent more common.

“While our postmarking practices have not changed, we have made adjustments to our transportation operations that will result in some mailpieces not arriving at our originating processing facilities on the same day that they are mailed. Because postmarks are generally applied at those processing facilities, this means that the date on the postmarks applied at those facilities may not necessarily match the date of mailing,” Purcell told HuffPost.

The reorganization takes the form of a 10-year plan, dubbed “Delivering for America,” that then-Postmaster Louis DeJoy announced in 2021. It’s the Postal Service’s way of cutting costs enough to stay solvent while receiving no taxpayer dollars and meeting on-time delivery goals, and includes “eliminating redundant networks,” “eliminating unnecessary facilities” and cutting transportation between local post offices and regional hubs from twice to once daily, in many cases.

That latter step has affected thousands of post office locations, and adds a day to mail delivery times for locations that are 50 miles or more from some 60 regional processing centers, though Postal Service officials have argued that the reorganization saves time elsewhere.

Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer at the Election Center, a research and education organization that caters to election officials and others involved in election administration, said the reorganization reflects longer-term changes in the way Americans use the mail system — more packages, fewer letters. Still, she said, the changes could affect all sorts of election-related activities, even in states where voting laws don’t have specific language about postmarks on mail-in ballots.

“Voter registration will be the first thing that will hit, all across the country, particularly in states without online voter registration,” Patrick said.

“There are always changes from one election cycle to the next, it seems, and it doesn’t mean that there’s a change everywhere, for every election,” she added. “But this is one of those changes that does affect pretty much every state in one way or another.”

The Postal Service argued in November that Americans ought to know the truth about postmark delays.

“If customers are aware that the postmark date may not align with the date on which the Postal Service first accepted possession of a mailpiece, they will be better equipped to adjust their plans accordingly,” the agency said. “And if policymakers or other entities that create rules utilizing the postmark date are aware of what the postmark date signifies, they are better equipped to determine whether their rules adequately serve their purposes.”

Like many issues in election administration, this one could change dramatically based on a pending court decision.

The Supreme Court in November agreed to hear a challenge to Mississippi’s practice of counting votes postmarked by Election Day. Arguments will occur sometime this year, with a decision expected in June or July.

If the court decides such laws aren’t constitutional, “then we have to back up the date from when ballots have to be received,” said Kersey of the West Virginia secretary of state’s office. “You add in the Postal Service’s new delays [and] that really pours fuel on the fire for getting a ballot counted in time.”

That new schedule, he said, could have dramatic political implications.

“What happens in those last 14 days of an election can sometimes change the outcome of an election,” he said.