Two weeks before the election, there are signs that delays continue to plague the U.S. mail, a tracking effort by the USA TODAY Network and the University of Maryland’s Howard Center for Investigative Journalism found.
Of 64 letters and packages sent short distances within battleground states since mid-September, 14 took longer than the U.S. Postal Service’s own three-day service standard for first-class local mail. Most of the problems arose in Michigan, although Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida each had at least one late arrival.
Eight of the shipments took a week or more to get to their cross-town destinations, including one letter that still has not arrived, according to the post office’s online tracking system. The missing letter was put in the mail two weeks ago, on Oct. 6.
Although the mailings were too small in number to determine whether widespread delays are occurring, the erratic results make it hard to know whether or not your ballot will arrive at the elections office […]
At least once every week or two, I order electronic parts from a distributor in Minnesota; I live in Colorado. I always specify USPS Priority Mail. They always arrive in less than the three days that are guaranteed. Just a data point … no conclusions or hypotheses.
I said in a previous post on this page that we were told that our votes were not counted in 2018. Now I wish there was a way to track our mail-in-votes and find out if they were counted. This is the first year we did not go to the polls in person. The poll workers were all well known to us and us to them.