USPS and civil rights groups reach deal on Georgia ballots
More than 2M have already voted in Jan. 5 runoff
Civil rights groups and the U.S. Postal Service struck a deal on speedier ballot-handling procedures ahead of Georgia’s critical runoff election, avoiding a court battle at a time when the mail system is getting hammered by holiday packages and staffing shortages.
More than 2 million Georgians have already cast their votes in the Jan. 5 race that will decide control of the U.S. Senate. Democrats John Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock are attempting to pick off two Republican incumbents — Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler — by maximizing early and absentee votes from key constituencies, especially Black voters in the Atlanta area, that have been hit especially hard by mail slowdowns playing out across the country for months.
The agreement on ballot processing marks a significant pivot for the
Postal Service and its Justice Department lawyers in a case that began in August.
The civil rights groups, the NAACP and Vote Forward, argued to U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the District of Columbia that Postmaster General Louis Dejoy should have secured a regulator’s opinion before enacting an aggressive cost-cutting agenda blamed for delaying more than 7 percent of the nation’s mail this past summer.
They also claimed that
such slowdowns erode the mail agency ’s ability to facilitate ballot deliveries.
Sullivan agreed, and blocked Dejoy’s moves. The agency spent weeks negotiating with the plaintiffs in the lead-up to the Nov. 3 election, only to appeal Sullivan’s ruling shortly thereafter.
The Postal Service returned to negotiations and, without conceding ground in the case, agreed late Wednesday to adopt new measures designed to expedite ballot processing and delivery.
The agency agreed to treat ballots still in processing plants within three days of the election as express mail, which translates to next-day delivery. Ballots traveling from a printing vendor in New York to Georgia residents would also get fast-tracked. Additionally, the mail service agreed to bypass processing plants and route completed ballots in Atlanta directly to vote-counters; conduct sweeps of postal facilities for misplaced ballots and report the results daily; and follow previous court-ordered procedures for expediting ballots.
The deal follows the release of troubling ballot-processing data in the Atlanta postal district, the state’s most populous region and its most diverse. The city and its suburbs were crucial to delivering Georgia to President-elect Joe Biden, and have accounted for 565,000 of absentee ballots requested, or more than 40 percent of the state’s total in the runoffs.
The region also has recorded some of the worst mail service in the South.