LAS VEGAS — Voters in swing states such as Wisconsin and Georgia can trust their mail ballots will arrive at election offices on time, America’s top postal official insisted Thursday — but pols on both sides of the aisle weren’t buying it as they blasted him for service declines across the country.
Testifying before the House Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee, US Postal Service CEO and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said his 650,000-person workforce is on guard to make sure ballots move and folks can “absolutely” trust nothing will hinder their votes’ delivery.
The House panel met to weigh the agency’s role in the 2024 elections, which has drawn substantial scrutiny from state election officials.
Mail-in voting jumped 25% between 2016 and 2020, subcommittee Chair David Joyce (R-Ohio) said, and this year “we expect that voting by mail will be popular again.”
DeJoy breezily brushed off concerns: “We’ve delivered in the heightened part of a pandemic, in the most sensationalized political time of elections.”
The Brooklyn-born postal chief — who took the job in 2020, three months before that year’s balloting — said USPS is “fully ready to successfully deliver the nation’s mail-in ballots for voters who choose to use us to vote.”
Despite those blandishments, House members pummeled DeJoy over his Delivering for America plan that shifts and consolidates mail processing from smaller outposts to urban centers to cut costs as first-class-mail volume has declined around 500% since 2000.
Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) said the agency’s Badger State reorganization “broke” mail delivery there.
“You blew the rocket ship up,” Pocan said, referring to a shift to Milwaukee for all Wisconsin mail processing. “I truly understand you’re focused on the cost savings. I just want you to be as focused on the delivery of the mail.”
Joyce chided DeJoy over a 51% drop in on-time first-class-mail performance in Atlanta under the consolidation plan’s changes, which he said “erode the public confidence” in the agency.
“It is imperative that the Postal Service get this right,” he said.
Getting it right will be especially important in swing-state Nevada. Following the 2020 pandemic, the Silver State authorized postal-only balloting for general elections, which magnified the effect of mail-processing issues.
The state sends every registered voter a mail-in ballot, but the practice has yet to catch on fully. In 2022, 51% of the slightly more than 1 million ballots cast were returned by mail; 27.7% were cast early in person, and 21% were cast in person on Election Day.
Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar’s office did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Over the summer, DeJoy halted a plan to process outgoing mail from Reno and other northern Nevada cities in Sacramento, Calif., roughly 132 miles away. Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.), who represents the area, and Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) successfully lobbied USPS to keep outbound mail processing in Reno.
The National Vote at Home Institute, a nonpartisan group that boosts the use of mailed-out paper ballots, rates Nevada one of the top postal-voting states.
The agency gives priority handling to outgoing ballots sent to voters and will separate returned ballots for priority processing, but he urged voters to send in those ballots seven days before they’re due.
DeJoy said using an Intelligent Mail barcode that would track each return piece step-by-step through the system would help. But neither USPS nor the main associations of state election officials could say how many of the nation’s 8,000 local election jurisdictions will implement the coding this year.
Tammy Patrick, CEO of programs at the National Association of Election Administrators’ Election Center, told The Post California and Virginia, the latter something of a swing state, each mandate the special barcode’s use on postal ballots.
Keep US Posted, a nonprofit group promoting postal reform, told The Post just-introduced legislation to rein in periodic postage hikes and hold the agency accountable by reducing its rate authority if it doesn’t meet performance goals would guarantee “effective and affordable mail service for the American public,” easing concerns about postal voting.
Lawmakers and watchdogs aren’t the only ones criticizing the agency.
“The United States Postal Service has admitted that it is a poorly run mess that is experiencing mail loss and delays at a level never seen before,” former President Donald Trump said recently on Truth Social. So “how can we possibly be expected to allow or trust the U.S. Postal Service to run the 2024 Presidential Election? It is not possible for them to do so. HELP!”
DeJoy, a Trump fundraiser before his USPS appointment, offered reporters a simple riposte: “My response is, like my response to everyone who says that we’re not prepared for the election, is that they’re wrong, and I don’t know that I need to comment any more than that. They’re wrong,”
