Judge blasts USPS for missing deadline
Postal Service inspectors criticized after failing to make sure ballots were found
A federal judge on Wednesday criticized Postal Service inspectors who failed to meet a deadline to sweep postal facilities in Florida and other parts of the country on Election Day to make sure that any left-behind ballots were counted.
U.S. District Judge Em met Sullivan warned “someone might have a price topay for that.” Sullivan said he was upset to learn that after the “clock [has] run out. Game’s over. And we find out there was not compliance with a very important court order.”
Tuesday’s order was one of several lawsuits against the Postal Service over cost-cutting measures that slowed mail delivery this year and raised concerns that mail-in ballots would notbe delivered on time— at thesametime that President Donald Trump has attacked mail voting as fraudulent throughout his campaign.
“Based on the results we’ve seen so far, mail ballots have tended to favor Democratic candidates, but the most important thing in any election is that all the ballots get counted, no matter how they are cast,” said Jonathan Manes, anattorney with the Chicago-based MacArthur Justice Center, on Wednesday. “No voter should have their ballot rejected because of avoidable delays at the Postal Service.”
Much of Sullivan’s order hinged on postal data showing roughly 300,000 mail-in ballots in several states had not received scans showing they had been delivered. In court filings this week, the Postal Service said that those ballots had been scanned into the U.S. mail system since Oct. 24but hadnot been scanned again, including more than 11,000 in Pennsylvania, nearly 16,000 in Florida and more than 6,000 in Michigan. But Postal Service officials said that a missing destination scan does not automatically mean that a ballot was not delivered.
The agency said it has pushed to ensure sameday local delivery of ballots by circumventing certain processing steps entirely, leaving them without the final delivery scan.
Kevin Bray, the agency’s top executive overseeing election mail for the Postal Service, testified Wednesday afternoon that he didn’t know how many ballots were undelivered by Tuesday, but it’s possible some of the 10,000 ballots identified Monday didn’t make it.
It is not known whether the stray ballots are significant enough to affect the presidential election.
“There’s no excuse. It should never have happened,” he said about mail that didn’t arrive on time. “We don’t want delayed mail.”
There are hundreds of processing centers across the country, including in West Palm Beach and Opa-locka in MiamiDade County. An attorney involved in the lawsuit
told the judge that they got a tip that four days’ worth of mail-in ballots were still sitting at a processing facility in Greensboro, N.C., where as many as 3,000 ballots were unaccounted for. Bray said he didn’t know about problems in Greensboro until Wednesday’s hearing.
In Florida, the elections supervisor in Miami-Dade did receive ballots after the fact that won’t be counted past Election Day. Robert Rodriguez, the assistant deputy Supervisor of Elections, said 130 vote-by-mail ballots came in Wednesday, and it’s unclear how many, if any, of those came from sweeps done in recent days.
In Broward County, 191 ballots arrived in Wednesday’s mail, said Steve Van core, Bro ward’ s elections office spokesman.
Vancore said he estimated the number of errant ballots “will be small,” but expected more mail Thursday “because we intercepted ballots that were scheduled for today [Wednesday] atthe Opa-locka” mail facility.
Alison Novoa, spokeswoman for the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections, said 134 vote-by-mail ballots were received in the mail Wednesday.
Sullivan had ordered the Postal Service to do the sweeps of postal facilities— and to do it by 3p.m. Tuesday. South Florida was among the dozen-plus regions specified as needing extra attention for making sure stray ballots were taken care of. Other postal facilities chosen for sweeps, which could have ballots that help determine the next president, are two areas in Pennsylvania and Houston.
Bray in a court document said it would take several hours for an employee to “sweep” a smaller facility while larger facilities, such as in Los Angeles, could require five employees. And it would prevent employees from doing other duties, he said.
An attorney for the Department of Justice told the judge that “it took time for the information to get to the right people” and “they were not there to do an inspection and there wasn’t enough time to get them on site by 3 p.m. to get them to comply with your court’s order.”
The attorney said he confirmed with facility plant managers that sweeps were conducted anyway and only a “handful” of ballots— 12or 13— were found in Pennsylvania and “moved onto the appropriate election authorities .”
Three ballots were found in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and 10 were found in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
In court documents filed Wednesday, thegovernment described the hurdles posed by the deadline.
“Inspectors were not physically on site at the time of the Court’s order, because they had been scheduled to arrive later in the day, to conduct inspections at the most critical time when the vast majority of any ballots processed on Election Day would be on site, and even if they were, Inspectors are not equipped to do full operational sweeps in the time allotted, although they do and did conduct their own sweeps as part of their reviews.”
In the last 14 months, about 4.5 billion pieces of mail have been election-related, a 114% increase compared to the 2016 election cycle, the Postal Service said. “Ballots will continue to be accepted and processed as they are presented to us and we will deliver them to their intended destination,” the Postal Service said in a prepared statement Tuesday.
The next court hearing will be 11 a.m. Thursday.