Mail-In Voters Could Face A New Obstacle This Midterm Season
HuffPost
Cost-cutting at the Postal Service has made it more common for mail to be postmarked a day or more after it’s in the system — and that could make it harder for people to vote.
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.
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Cost-cutting at the Postal Service has made it more common for mail to be postmarked a day or more after it’s in the system — and that could make it harder for people to vote.
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