The Postal Service's Final Sprint: Sweeps, Extra Trips and 4.2 Billion Pieces of Political Mail Stand Between the Last Ballots and Tuesday
The last mail ballots in America are moving through a system running on overtime: extra staffing, special branch lines, daily facility sweeps and, on Election Day itself, extra trips — a sprint Reuters documented on the final day before the vote.
From longer hours and extra staffing to special lines in its branches, the U.S. 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. The scale behind the sprint is the story: in the last two months, USPS 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 — up more than 300 million pieces over the 2024 election cycle. Thousands of postal workers are handling the final ballots before Tuesday's election, with expedited handling, extra deliveries and special pickups all in force.
The final-days machinery is deliberate. There are daily, and sometimes multiple, sweeps of all postal facilities in the closing days to search for any remaining ballots that need to be delivered, and on Sunday USPS brought on extra staff to collect, postmark and process mail to expedite ballot deliveries. Amber McReynolds, chair of the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors, said voting by mail seemed to be running a little higher than in prior midterm elections, in part because ballots went out earlier in some states. The institution has done this a long time — USPS has been delivering ballots since the Civil War, at the direction of President Abraham Lincoln — and at modern scale: in 2024 it delivered 99.2 million ballots to and from voters, in an election where about 30 percent of votes were cast by mail, down from 46 percent in 2020.
Election Day is the hardest day of the system, because the rules underneath it are not one rule. On Tuesday, workers will make extra trips to postal facilities to collect the last ballots, and in some cases USPS may drive directly to get ballots in hand. But states set their own finish lines: some allow ballots as long as they are postmarked by November 3, while others require the ballot to be in an election official's possession by a set hour on Tuesday — a blizzard of varying deadlines, ballot designs and requirements that the service navigates through its special portal at electionmail.org. For a Texas voter whose ballot is still in the mail stream on Monday night, that patchwork is the whole story: the sprint only counts if the envelope lands on the right side of the state's line.
