A Judge Ordered An Immediate Sweep Of 12 Postal Districts To Look For Undelivered Ballots
A Federal District Court judge on Tuesday ordered an immediate sweep of 12 postal districts searching for undelivered ballots after the Postal Service said in court that some 300,000 ballots it had received had not been scanned for delivery.
The dramatic Election Day order came as record numbers of Americans have voted by mail this year, as many voters were anxious to avoid crowds at the polls during the pandemic — and at the end of a campaign season in which fears that recent Postal Service changes had caused extensive mail delays that could imperil ballots.
The judge, Emmet G. Sullivan of the District of Columbia, ordered the sweep to begin before 3 p.m. to “ensure that no ballots have been held up and that any identified ballots are immediately sent out for delivery.” He said he was particularly concerned about ballot delivery in districts where there has been slow processing of ballots for days, including Central Pennsylvania, Philadelphia and Detroit.
He ordered the Postal Service to provide him with an update on the sweep certifying that “sweeps were conducted and that no ballots were left behind.”
In a court filing this afternoon, the Postal Service said it could comply with conducting the searches for ballots by the end of the day but not by the judge’s 3 p.m. deadline.
The “process remains ongoing,” lawyers for agency wrote. “Defendants were unable to accelerate the daily review process to run from 12:30 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. without significantly disrupting pre-existing activities on the day of the Election, something which Defendants did not understand the Court to invite or require.”
Derrick Johnson, the president of the N.A.A.C.P. and a plaintiff in the suit, said he believed the Postal Service would complete the sweeps before Election Day ended rather than risk being held in contempt of court.
“It was a victory for individual voters,” Mr. Johnson said of the order. “There will have to be remediation if they’re unable to address the order. I’m sure the Postal Service does not want to be held in contempt of the judge’s order.”
Roughly 300,000 ballots that the U.S. Postal Service says it processed show no scan confirming their delivery to ballot-counting sites, according to data filed today in federal court in Washington, D.C., leaving voter-rights advocates concerned as low on-time delivery scores for mail ballots continue to plague some key swing districts.
Postal officials say just because a ballot never received a final scan before going out for delivery doesn’t mean, necessarily, that it wasn’t delivered. A machine scanning ballots for final processing can sometimes miss ballots that are stuck together or whose bar codes are smudged. And hand-sorted ballots typically do not receive a final scan before delivery.
The Postal Service has also authorized expedited delivery of ballots that forego the normal process, but voting-rights advocates are concerned that, without a scan verifying the ballots went out for delivery, some could be sitting uncounted at various postal facilities around the country.
Dave Partenheimer, a spokesman for the Postal Service, said the agency had been conducting daily searches at all of its facilities for ballots that might fall through the cracks.
“Since Oct. 29, the Inspection Service has been conducting daily reviews at all 220 facilities that process ballots,” he said. “Inspectors walk the facility and observe the conditions of mail. They also review Election and Political Mail logs for accuracy and completeness, review in and around staging areas for Election and Political Mail, scan for delayed mail, ensure Election Mail is processed expeditiously, and ensure no ballots are held for postage due.”
– The New York Times
