Washington ballots mailed on Election Day or even days in advance could be thrown out due to postmark delays

Washington voters who mail their ballots on Election Day this November, or even days in advance, could have their ballots thrown out as a result of compounding cost-cutting measures by the United States Postal Service leading to postmarking delays, local and state election officials are warning.

The Spokane County Elections Office has recommended voters shouldn’t return their ballots via a mailbox any later than Oct. 31, a full four days before the election; the Washington Secretary of State’s Office goes even further, cautioning voters to not use a mailbox within seven to 10 days ahead of the election.

Instead, voters should deposit ballots at a designated ballot drop box, which are managed by the county elections office, or have a ballot manually postmarked inside a post office, according to elections officials. A list of these county-operated drop boxes is available online and will be provided in ballots. Ballot drop box locations include public libraries throughout Spokane County.

Spokane County Auditor Vicky Dalton said she has never seen a similar breakdown in her nearly quarter-century managing the county’s elections.

“In years past, our post offices here would put a great deal of effort on election night to get the mail collected and transferred so it could get postmarked as of election day,” Dalton said. “We have worked so hard to train our voters on how to submit their ballots, and we now need to rework everybody’s behavior.”

In a podcast last week with The Spokesman-Review, Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs estimated that 30-40% of mail-in ballots come in after 8 p.m. on election day, which is the cutoff time for submitting ballots. For particularly close races – Spokane Councilman Zack Zappone, who is running for reelection this year against delivery driver Chris Savage, won his first election in 2021 by 260 votes, for example – a wave of disqualified ballots could sway elections.

State law allows mail-in ballots to be received and still counted after election day, even if they arrive to election workers days later, but only if they are postmarked on Election Day or before.

The USPS is proposing a policy update stating explicitly that it does not guarantee it will postmark mail on the day it is received. In a written statement, an agency spokesperson wrote that this would simply explicitly state what has always been true.

“The U.S. Postal Service has never guaranteed same-day postmarking …” the statement says.

But postal union leadership and election officials say the agency’s delivery of mail – and, critically for the upcoming election, postmarking – has been significantly delayed by multiple factors stemming from former Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s “10-year plan” to reform the postal service.

In prior years, mail from local post offices would be delivered twice-a-day to regional processing centers, where it should be postmarked en masse by machine, according to Ryan Harris, president of the Washington branch of the American Postal Workers Union. Those deliveries have been cut to once-a-day, in the morning, meaning mail sent on Election Day wouldn’t arrive at a processing center until the following day.

“If you’re lucky,” that piece of mail would be postmarked the day after it was sent, Harris added.

“But they just took away all of the (postmarking) machines,” he continued.

Many of the state’s processing centers have had their ability to postmark the bulk of their mail stripped out in a bid to reduce redundancy, according to the agency – creating bottlenecks in some areas of the state and Pacific Northwest as mail has to travel further before it can be postmarked.

“It sounds like Spokane doesn’t have the capacity to (postmark) all of those letters, so some of them might be going to Seattle or Portland first,” Harris said. “All of Montana is being sent to Spokane to be processed, but Spokane doesn’t have the capacity to do it.”

“Nobody knows” how long it would take for a given ballot to be postmarked, Harris continued, noting these delays could affect more than just an election, but also timely property tax payments and other mail that requires a timely postmark. According to the postal service’s performance dashboard, first-class mail has taken an average of 3.2 days to be delivered this year in Washington, though the dashboard does not provide data on the time to postmarking.

These issues have been years in the making, Harris said. In a statement, a USPS spokesperson said the agency’s reforms were meant to improve service.

The statement says changes are part of a 10-year plan to “achieve financial sustainability” through the creation of the Regional Transportation Optimization initiative.

“Implementation of this program will improve the usage of our transportation network, reduce the overall number of trips which will significantly reduce costs and carbon emissions, and in many instances, increase the efficiency with which customers receive their mail,” the statement said.

Harris argued the reforms have mostly served to reduce the postal service’s capacity to promptly process mail.

“It’s supposed to speed up mail and bring the costs down, but it’s actually slowed things down,” he said.

The same delays faced by voters in Washington may be affecting other states where mail-in voting is commonplace. WUSA-TV on Wednesday reported similar concerns from the Montgomery County, Maryland, elections board.

Local candidates for office raised concerns this week as they learned about the potential for disqualified ballots.

“If you want people to feel as though their vote doesn’t matter, you change the process on them during an election,” said Spokane City Councilman Jonathan Bingle, who is running for reelection this November against abortion rights activist Sarah Dixit. “With a change like this, you need a lot of leadup to make sure people understand what is going on. You don’t want people trying to vote who aren’t able to.”

Former attorney Kate Telis, who is running for another Spokane City Council seat against SCAFCO executive Alejandro Barrientos, worried the effects would be felt by lower-income people.

“Typically, when we make voting harder, it affects people in the lower economic bracket, the people who are just trying to make ends meet, and all they can do is get the ballot to their mailbox before they check off the other 12 things on their list that day,” Telis said. “It may seem like a small luxury, but even driving or walking to a ballot drop box is a luxury that some people do not have.”