Virginia Mail Service Improves — But Get Your Ballot In Early

The latest news from Richmond's once-beleaguered regional mail center is that delivery times are getting back to the national average — but the latest advice if you're voting by mail is to do it sooner rather than later, Virginia's two U.S. senators and two of its congresswomen said.

The group — Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, both Virginia Democrats, along with Reps. Jennifer McClellan, D-4th and Abigail Spanberger, D-7th — met Friday with Postmaster General Louis DeJoy in Richmond for a briefing on what the U.S. Postal Service has been doing to get service in Virginia back on track ahead of the challenge of handling hundreds of thousands of mailed absentee ballots.

Virginia started the year with the worst on-time delivery record in the nation, with just 66% of first-class mail arriving on time. The latest numbers show about 85% or 86% is on time now, up from the 78% reported in August, Warner said. But Charlottesville, plagued by staff shortages, is still a problem area.

Election mail, which gets special handling, is being delivered on time 95% of the time - 99% is delivered no more than one day late, Kaine said.

But, he added, "the one message that they would want us to give, and I think it's really important, is: If you want to vote by mail, do it as early as you can, because the volume starts to pick up at the end, and then that makes it even harder to meet this sort of expedited delivery standard."

On average, absentee ballots mailed by Virginia electoral boards are reaching voters in a bit more than two days, Spanberger said.

The last day to request a mail ballot is Oct. 25, and ballots must be postmarked by Election Day, Nov. 5. Because the Postal Service doesn't postmark every piece of mail, it's a good idea to make a point to ask that staff at the counter hand stamp a mailed ballot, Warner said.

Improvements include layout changes at the Richmond regional processing center in Sandston to speed the flow of letters and packages through the facility, improved lighting there and bringing trucking services that had been contracted out back in-house, the legislators said.

Also helping is reconfiguring the flow of letters and packages moving out of the facility toward their final destinations so that they now head in the same direction, which they hadn't before. 

And DeJoy told them that a significant problem that a Postal Service audit found at some processing and delivery centers when handling this year's primary elections - primarily that election mail wasn't separated from the rest for faster handling - won't be an issue at Richmond.

U.S, Postal Service auditors reported several issues that could affect absentee voters

"We could see in person the changes that they had made," McClellan said during a news conference at the General Assembly Building.

"I think they have come a long way. And what we saw at the facility, it's much more efficient in the facility, there's much more employee buy-in and training. They feel more comfortable and more confident in what they're doing, and we're seeing that in the numbers," she said.

Transformation plan

Virginia was the first postal region in the country to be revamped under DeJoy’s transformation plan, which includes a focus on mailing mail on fewer truck trips, specifically reducing these truck-trailer movements from two or three a day, to one.

But mailed ballots weren’t supposed to move that way.

These should have bypassed the Richmond Regional Processing and Distribution Center and gone directly to designated hubs in order to speed delivery to local election boards. But Postal Service auditors found four ballots at the Richmond regional center the day after the primary, some of which would not be counted because they did not have a postmark, which is required in Virginia for a mail ballot to be counted if it arrives after Election Day.

These are ballots found in the Richmond regional processing center that should have gone directly to a designated hub.

U.S. Postal Service Office of the Inspector General

The audit, which looked at 15 different postal regions, cited many deficiencies without specifying where the problems occurred. For example, the audit found:

•  On the primary election day, there were as many as 82 ballots at eight mail processing facilities that would not make it to the board of election offices on time to be counted. In some cases, this was because they had no process to separate ballots on election day for speedier processing. In others, it was because they stopped segregating ballots sooner than they should have while at one facility managers didn't know when primary election day was.
• Large volumes of mail in the Postal Service’s automated system for directing mail covered by change of address forms – an estimated 300,000 pieces in one facility – included ballots. McClellan said this was not an issue in Richmond.
• Twenty-nine of 35 delivery units inaccurately completed daily certifications that they had cleared all election mail. This included seven units that still had election mail onsite after certifying they had none and three with certifications completed by people who were not at the unit to actually see if mail had been cleared.
• Twelve of 15 mail processing facilities did not complete certifications that they had cleared all ballots, according to policy; auditors found as many as 220 ballots at seven facilities after they certified that they had cleared all election mail.
• Three of 15 mail processing units were not logging incoming election mail, as required.
• Two mail processing units said they had staging areas for handling election mail when they did not.

Last month, two national associations of election officials told DeJoy that they had not seen any improvement in Postal Service operations or any concerned effort to address their concerns.

“USPS staff, from Managers of Customer Relations to local postal carriers, are uninformed about USPS policies around election mail,” election officials said in their letter to DeJoy.

“This has led to inconsistent guidance given to election officials, as well as ballots being deliberately held to remediate erroneous billing issues, significantly delayed, or otherwise improperly processed. In some cases, this has resulted in misdelivery of ballots such that voters are disenfranchised,” they said.

In nearly every state, local election officials are receiving timely postmarked ballots well after Election Day and well outside the three to five business days the Postal Service says is its standard for first class, the officials said.

Election officials in several states report receiving anywhere from dozens to hundreds of ballots 10 or more days after postmark, the officials said.

Botetourt County voter registrar Traci S. Clark, who is president of Voter Registrars Association of Virginia, was one of the letter’s signers.

So far, local boards of elections in Virginia have received more than 655,500 mailed in ballots. That's down from about 919,000 at this point in the 2020 election.