Making sure those votes get in
Hundreds are hand-delivering their mail ballots
Gwendolyn Royster, 62, had every reason to send her ballot through the mail. The disabled Army veteran suffers from lung disease.
Instead, Royster drove downtown Thursday to the Bexar County Elections Department and brought her mail-in ballot with her. Leaning on a cane for support, she hand-delivered it to election officials to make certain her vote for former Vice President Joe Biden would count.
She said President Donald Trump’s comments about starving the U.S. Postal Service of funds to inhibit mail balloting made her distrust voting by mail.
“I was at the hospital yesterday,” Royster said. “I got two shots in the knees for pain, two shots in the shoulders, my left hip. So, no, this is not an easy task. I don’t leave the house, especially during the pandemic because I have underlying medical conditions, and my family is very afraid for me.
“But I want my vote to count,” she said.
Royster was not alone in taking great pains to hand-deliver a ballot meant to travel by mail. In an election season when unprecedented numbers of Bexar County voters have requested mail-in ballots, hundreds of them are making the trek down-town-to the elections office every day to deliver their ballots in person.
About 400 did so Tuesday, followed by 250 on both Wednesday and Thursday, said county Elections Administrator Jacque Callanen.
Already, the 2020 election has generated nearly twice as many mail-in ballots as Bexar County’s previous record.
As of Thursday, 100,112 had been sent to voters who applied for them, and 52,414 completed ballots had been sent back in the mail or hand-delivered to the elections office, Callanen said.
“We’re sitting at a 52 percent return,” she said, marveling at the turnout.
The most ballots the county had ever sent out in any previous election was 58,000.
In the entire 2016 general election cycle, Callanen’s office distributed 48,000 mail ballots and got back 39,000.
The deadline to apply for a mail ballot is next week; applications must be received by the Elections Department by Oct. 23.
Callanen said anyone who received a mail ballot but has since
decided to vote in person — a common situation this year, she said — should bring the ballot to their polling site to surrender it upon voting.
Anyone whowants to hand-deliver a mail ballot may do so only to the elections department at 1103 S. Frio St. The deadline is 7 p.m. Election Day, Nov. 3.
Ballots sent in by mail must be postmarked by that same deadline.
“The post office is working — if you could please put that in your story,” Callanen said.
Try telling that to Martha Barton-rivera. After controversy engulfed the Postal Service this summer, the retired teacher simply doesn’t trust it to deliver her ballot on time.
“My sister lives in Philadelphia, requested a mail-in ballot,” Barton-rivera, 68, said after hand-delivering her own ballot. “It’s never come. Yesterday, she went to City Hall in Philadelphia and waited 3 hours and 48 minutes to get a mail-in ballot to take home. So I don’t trust that it’s going smoothly.”
About a dozen other voters echoed the same theme Thursday. Some were concerned about the effect of cuts ordered by Postmaster General Louis Dejoy this summer that caused delays in delivery.
Even as the pandemic has caused historic numbers of voters to request mail-in ballots, Trump has asserted without evidence that such voting would lead to a fraudulent election.
Dejoy, a Republican megadonor and ally of Trump, took office in June. He swiftly reduced overtime, banned late or extra delivery trips and ordered the removal of mail-sorting machines, including six at the main San Antonio sorting facility.
Some of the policy changes
were suspended after a national outcry or in response to judges’ orders, but postal workers have said delays persist.
A San Antonio postal union leader, Carlos Barrios, said Thursday that service in San Antonio was one to two days behind its usual standard, mostly because of a high volume of mail.
“The real gauge is going to be in about a week or two,” Barrios said.
Dianne Simpson was planning to mail her ballot, but the retired office manager reversed course after seeing the high volume of mail for herself.
“These mailboxes, when I
came by a few days ago, were so stuffed you couldn’t put anything in them,” said Simpson, 71, referring to the Laurel Heights Post Office on Mccullough Avenue. “I went inside to put it in a slot, and the things that people were mailing were falling off the counter.”
Not all who brought their ballots downtown Thursday doubted the Postal Service’s ability to deliver on time.
Steve Swann, who said he voted to re-elect Trump, said dropping off his ballot in person offered “an added level of control.”
“I would’ve been fine mailing it,” he said, “but the line was no big deal, and any type of road trip
these days is all right.”
Swann, 65, said any suggestion that the president has intentionally tried to undermine mail-in voting was “BS.”
“The guy he put in place to be postmaster general should have waited until after the election to do these budget cuts,” Swann said. “I know they need to cut some things, but this was the wrong time to do it. And they figured that out quick. I don’t think it was intentional.”
Swann said he believes Trump has better “character” than he first suspected.
“He cares about everybody,” Swann said. “To me, economic
opportunity is the way for everybody to get better. I don’t think he’s racist or discriminatory or anything, I just think he’s trying to do a good job for everybody.”
Royster, who is Black, had an opposing view — one that drove her to rely on herself to deliver her ballot, no matter the physical discomfort.
“There’s a whole lot of tension and chaos and racism and bigotry that’s going on in the country right now,” she said. “I really don’t like what this past administration has stood for, and as a veteran, I’m very concerned about the future for my children, my grandchildren.”