Worries about mail-in ballots per-
sisted through Election Day, when
a federal judge issued a 3 p.m. deadline
to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service to
search a dozen facilities for ballots. The
inspectors missed the deadline, though
the Department of Justice, representing
the Postal Service, later said that routine
sweeps had been completed and that
hundreds of ballots in Pennsylvania,
Texas and elsewhere had been found.
It can take weeks for all mail-in votes
to be counted, during which irregular-
ities may be identifi ed — North Caroli-
na, for example, accepts ballots received
up to nine days after the election if they
are postmarked by Election Day. But by
the end of the week of the election, no
major problems with the mail had come
to light, despite Trump and his support-
ers’ repeated eff orts to undermine the
integrity of the mail-in process. ‘‘When
you get into interesting times like we’re
living in now,’’ says Daniel A. Piazza, the
chief curator of the Smithsonian National
Postal Museum, ‘‘that sense of reliability,
predictability — that no matter what, the
mail is going to come to the door — has
become comforting to people. You real-
ize very quickly that when other things
break down, this keeps going.’’
Emanuel Espinoza, a rural letter carrier in Plant
City. Previous pages, left: Outside a post office in
Riviera Beach, Fla. Previous pages, right: Charles
Ansell scanning a ballot for the election supervisor.