POSTAL SERVICE PUT TO TEST
We mailed about 400 letters to test the USPS. Here’s what we found
Most of the more than 400 letters mailed within Connecticut during three days in September arrived at their destination within a few days, although some took much longer or never arrived, a Hearst CT Insider investigation shows.
In advance of an election which will involve unprecedented amounts of votingrelated mail, journalists from Hearst Connecticut Media spent a week testing the postal service’s delivery times in the state.
The results were encouraging — unless you sent something to Bridgeport City
Hall, or from the New Fairfield Post Office on Sept. 14.
One test mailing sent that Monday from the post office on Brush Hill Road to Town Hall — addresses literally 200 feet across the street from one another — took
a nine-day, roughly 250-mile journey through distribution centers in three states.
Another sent to the Bridgeport Town Clerk hadn’t arrived more than two weeks after being sent, and was officially “in transit” as of Oct. 6.
For the most part, most of the more than 400 mailings arrived within two or three days, and delivery times were mostly consistent. Less than a handful mysteriously never arrived at their destination.
Officials said they’re keeping an eye on the mail in the days and weeks leading up to the Nov. 3 election.
“We have been in touch with the USPS to express concerns about the general election and to impress upon them the importance of prompt delivery of election mail,” Gabe Rosenberg, a spokesman for the Secretary of the State’s office, said. “As the ballots themselves just started going out Friday, we have not heard about any issues with them as yet.”
Amy Gibbs, a USPS spokesperson, said in a prepared statement that the “U.S. Postal Service’s number one priority between now and the November election is the secure, timely delivery of the nation’s Election Mail.”
That could include the use of “extraordinary measures” like extra deliveries and special pickups “to connect blank ballots entered by election officials to voters, or completed ballots returned by voters entered close to or on Election Day to their intended destination,” Gibbs said, calling the practice consistent with past election cycles.
“The Postal Service has more than sufficient capacity to process current and anticipated Election Mail volumes with the existing machine supply,” Gibbs said. “We are working closely with local election officials in Connecticut, the region, and across the country to meet that goal.”
How the test was done
The CTInsider project was launched after national controversy over the role of the mail in this year’s election.
President Trump in August acknowledged that his opposition to providing additional funding for the postal service would influence the service’s ability to handle millions of ballots. He has spent months casting doubt on the validity of these votes, suggesting they could be subject to fraud.
Observers also criticized cuts made by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who was appointed to the job after donating more than $2 million to Trump and the GOP. This has raised concerns that all sorts of things could go wrong in an election during a pandemic with a potentially unprecedented number of absentee ballots.
So, Hearst Connecticut Media staff wanted to test the postal service’s capabilities and protocols in case of issues down the road. The methodology broke down the test mailings into three groups.
First, reporters working at various Hearst Connecticut Media Group newspapers – Connecticut Post, Stamford Advocate, New Haven Register, Norwalk Hour, Greenwich Time, Danbury NewsTimes and others – mailed letters to editors’ homes throughout the area on three separate days — Monday, Sept. 14, Wednesday, Sept. 16 and Friday, Sept. 18 — from 16 different post offices in the state.
Second, on those days reporters also sent letters to town clerks in Bridgeport, Ansonia, New Haven, Guilford, Norwalk, Greenwich, Stamford, Middletown, Danbury, New Fairfield, Torrington, Milford, Ridgefield, Fairfield, Wilton and Darien from post offices in those same communities.
And in a third test, three letters were sent at the same time to the same address — and arrived all at the same time.
The letters were all sent between 10 and 11 a.m.
For the clerk letters, Hearst Connecticut staff plunked down the $3.55 to track each stop along the route to have a better idea what happened to them along the way in the event of any issues.
Town clerk’s offices are the nerve center of any municipality — and have already been at the center of mail-related election problems this year.
In the run-up to the primaries, for example, several town clerks complained they were being overwhelmed late in the process with a surge in applications for absentee ballots because an executive order allowed “no excuse” absentee voting due to the coronavirus pandemic.
And errors by a state contractor have resulted in absentee ballot applications sent to voters in Stratford with return addresses from Stafford — though the actual return envelopes for the applications had the correct address.
More recently, voters in Stamford complained that they hadn’t received absentee ballot applications, and the postal service said it is investigating why more than 200 voters in Enfield got primary ballots weeks late.
The results
With respect to Hearst’s test mailings, there wasn’t much drama.
Most of the letters arrived within three days – and 10 of those sent to town clerks even got to their destinations the day after they were sent. Along with the New Fairfield letters that took longer than the three days, two letters sent from the Ansonia post office took four days to arrive at City Hall, just two buildings away on Main Street.
But aside from the nine-day, three-state odyssey for the first New Fairfield mailing, the subsequent two arrived at Town Hall on Brush Hill Road within two and three days of being sent, respectively, after being routed through a USPS distribution center in White Plains, N.Y.
That’s the most common route for mail in southwestern Connecticut, Gibbs said.
Routing the mail through large distribution centers like the one in White Plains is the best way for the postal service to “use resources, including space, staffing, processing equipment, and transportation,” she said.
“This reduces onsite handling and directs attention to customer and delivery services in our post offices,” Gibbs said. “Optimizing our workflow in this way is considered an economy of scale. Finally, we also do this to ensure the safety of the American public as letter mail pieces benefit from scanning by our biohazard detection systems.”
Rosenberg said state officials are mindful that about a third of Connecticut sees its mail sent through White Plains, thus extending the delivery timeline by about a day.
Though some took longer than others, the vast majority of the mailings got to their destinations without any incident.
But what exactly happened to two of the letters sent to the Bridgeport clerk’s office are something of a mystery.
One, sent Sept. 16, arrived two days later without incident. But it’s unclear what happened to the letters sent Sept. 14 and Sept. 18. Both appear in the tracking system as having not arrived, despite the town clerk’s office reporting they received two of the three as of Oct. 6.
A mail carrier tried to deliver the first letter the day after it was sent “but could not access the delivery location,” according to tracking information. “We will redeliver on the next business day.” There have been no updates since.
The letter sent Sept. 18 was marked “in transit, arriving late” five days later — and is still marked as undelivered.
“Your package will arrive later than expected, but is still on its way,” the tracking info says. “It is currently in transit to the next facility.”
Letters sent to addresses other than the town clerk followed the same pattern in New Fairfield — those sent on Monday, Sept. 14 spent two to three more days in transit than mail sent from Bridgeport, Ansonia, New Haven, Guiford, Norwalk, Greenwich, Stamford, Middletown, and Danbury.
Rosenberg said any issues seem isolated so far and said some of the problems from the primary could have been related to Tropical Storm Isaias hitting Connecticut days before.
“There have not been widespread issues, but there have been some publicized localized issues,” he said. “Also, the tropical storm a few days before the primary shutting power to most of the state, including the Hartford mail processing center, caused significant problems over that weekend.”
National perspective
DeJoy, the postmaster general, said in a statement last week that the postal service’s top priority would be secure delivery of election-related mail.
Those comments come after he announced a halt to some of the originally planned cuts, but worries persist about the postal service’s ability to handle what is projected to be a massive increase in mail-in votes.
A Hearst Television National Investigative Unit has also uncovered problems across the country with how the postal service handles ballots in the mail, leading to urgent calls to fix the issues before November’s general election.
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong and several other attorneys general took the Trump administration to court to win an injunction last month — and Tong pledged to return if necessary to thwart what he called a “politically-motivated attack on the U.S. Postal Service in order to delegitimize and disrupt the November election.
“This nationwide injunction is a significant victory but this fight is far from over,” Tong said. “We will continue to vigorously defend the rule of law and our postal service operations. Americans can vote with confidence this November, and trust that we are doing everything it takes to ensure each and every ballot is counted.”
Gibbs said that as of Oct. 1, the postal service began using “additional resources, including, but not limited to, expanded processing procedures, extra transportation, extra delivery and collection trips, and overtime, to ensure that Election Mail reaches its intended destination in a timely manner.”
USPS has also authorized local management to employ “extraordinary measures... to accelerate the delivery of ballots, when the Postal Service is able to identify the mailpiece as a ballot.
“These extraordinary measures include, but are not limited to, expedited handling, extra deliveries and special pickups, as used in past elections, to connect blank ballots entered by election officials to voters, or completed ballots returned by voters entered close to or on Election Day to their intended destination,” Gibbs said.
Staff writers Tara O’Neill, Brian Lockhart, Mary O’Leary, Ed Stannard, Kendra Baker, Michael Mayko, Jeannette Ross, Susan Shultz, Macklin Reid, Emily Olson, Cassandra Day, Paul Schott, Ken Borsuk, Pat Tomlinson and Bill Bloxsom and editors Keila Torres Ocasio, Mandy Hofmockel and Viktoria Sundqvist contributed to this report.