The Postal Service Is Sprinting: Millions of Ballots, Extra Staff and Facility Sweeps Before Tuesday

The last ballots are moving through a system built for this week. The U.S. Postal Service is taking an array of special actions to make sure mail-in ballots are counted on Tuesday, Reuters reported on Monday — longer hours, extra staffing, expedited handling, extra deliveries and special pickups, with some branches extending hours, setting up a 'Ballot Postmark Only' line at retail counters or offering a drive-through Ballot Mail option.

The scale explains the sprint. 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 a ballot measure — up more than 300 million pieces over the 2024 election cycle. In 2024, USPS delivered 99.2 million ballots to and from voters, and about 30 percent of all votes were cast by mail. On Sunday the agency brought on extra staff simply to collect, postmark and process mail, and in the final days it is running daily — sometimes multiple — sweeps of all of its facilities to search for any ballot still sitting anywhere.

The work is older than the politics around it. 'We've done it in a cross-partisan, non-partisan, apolitical way. We'll continue to operate that way,' said Amber McReynolds, chair of the Postal Service Board of Governors, noting that USPS has been delivering ballots since the Civil War, at the direction of President Abraham Lincoln, and that voting by mail seemed a little higher than in prior midterms in part because ballots went out earlier in some states. This year the sprint runs under a legal cloud the Supreme Court has already ruled on once: President Donald Trump ordered the agency to write rules barring it from delivering ballots if states did not agree to turn over lists of eligible voters, and the court blocked Trump and USPS from enforcing those rules in September.

For a New York City voter, the state rules are the part that bites, and they are the strict end of the national patchwork Reuters describes: some states count a ballot postmarked by November 3, others require it in an election official's hands by a set hour Tuesday. New York's mail-ballot application window closes in person on Monday — this desk's published deadline file has the details — and the polls themselves open at 6 a.m. Tuesday for anyone whose ballot is still in an envelope at home. On Election Day, Reuters reports, postal workers will make extra trips to facilities to collect the last ballots — in some cases driving them directly to election officials. The sprint ends when the counting starts.