MAIL RELIABILITY
Will the U.S. Postal Service be up to processing
and delivering an election-eve flood of tens of
millions of ballots? Under a major Trump donor
named postmaster general in June, cost-cutting
plans are already triggering delays in ordinary
mail. A surge of mailed ballots could put the
system under extraordinary strain.
Zahn, the Wisconsin voter, said his local mail is
now routed through Milwaukee 50 miles away,
meaning mail that reached a neighbor in a day
or two a decade ago now takes about a week.
“The pipeline that moves mail between voters
and election officials is very leaky,” Charles Stewart
III, a political scientist at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, wrote in a 2010 study. In
a July update, Stewart estimated that roughly 4%
of mail ballots were lost through this process in
the 2016 general election.
States including Wisconsin are now scrambling
to add USPS “intelligent mail” bar codes to their
systems so ballots can be tracked through the
mail. In states including Florida, Ohio, North
Carolina and Georgia, counties are adding
ballot-tracking software that gives voters more
precise ballot status all the way to election
authorities, said Steve Olsen, CEO of BallotTrax,
the leading provider.
But such measures aren’t yet widespread.
In some states, voters who don’t trust the mail
can use drop boxes instead. But boxes have
been vandalized and poorly secured. Some
Republicans say they invite fraud. The Trump
campaign is suing Pennsylvania over plans to
use them in November.Image: Ted S. Warren