Service cuts initiated under President Donald Trump’s first postmaster general could delay mail throughout most of the nation, putting millions of mail-in voters at risk of blowing ballot deadlines in future elections.
An internal watchdog at the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has criticized the agency for not doing nearly enough to ensure the public is aware of the issue — which is likely to be especially severe in rural areas. And election administrators in two states with key contests already underway have taken steps to warn voters about the potential ramifications.
An ongoing multi-pronged GOP campaign, led by Trump, to restrict mail voting — especially ballots that arrive after Election Day — could ultimately deepen the delays’ impact.
A new USPS policy known as Regional Transportation Optimization (RTO) will eliminate evening mail pickups from post offices more than 50 miles away from a regional processing facility. The changes, already in effect for roughly 16% of the U.S. population, will mean mail will be postmarked and delivered at least one day later than before.
RTO was implemented as part of the Delivering for America (DFA) initiative, a series of controversial reforms aimed at increasing efficiency and reducing costs launched in 2021 by Louis DeJoy, a major Republican and Trump donor then serving as postmaster general.
The delivery delay means that if mail voters wait until the last day or two before the election to mail their ballot, as they often have done before, they could be disenfranchised.
“This is catching everybody off guard,” said Vicky Dalton, county auditor for Spokane, Washington.
A spokesperson for the USPS pledged to provide a statement to Democracy Docket before the deadline given, but did not do so.
There’s no exact figure for how many ballots were cast through the mail in last year’s election, because most states also include ballots placed in dropboxes in their tally of mail votes. But a reasonable ballpark estimate puts it at somewhere between 16 and 32 million votes — roughly 10% of all ballots cast, even at the low end of the estimate.
Even before the postal service reductions, tardy ballots were a problem. Nearly 104,000 ballots were rejected last year because they arrived too late, according to federal data.
And Dalton said many voters are already cutting it pretty close.
“In just about any election, 50% of the ballots that will end up counting we receive Monday, Tuesday, and — for those that are in the mail — Wednesday morning,” she said. “A lot of [voters] are putting them in the mail stream on Tuesday — Election Day.”
In Spokane, around 0.5% of ballots are postmarked too late to be counted in major elections. But that figure can rise to around 3% in off-year, mostly local elections. Those smaller races often have tighter margins, so even just a few uncounted ballots could sway outcomes.
Election laws vary state by state, but every state allows someone with an excuse — like military deployment, disability or illness — to vote by mail. Twenty-eight states allow anyone to request mail-in ballots, no excuse necessary. Another eight states (and Washington, D.C.) conduct elections entirely or mostly by mail — meaning every registered voter is automatically mailed a ballot.
How to decide whether a mail-in ballot was cast on time also differs across the country. Thirty-four states go by delivery date — officials must get mail-in ballots on or before Election Day to be counted. Sixteen states (and DC, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Virgin Islands) go by postmark date: a ballot postmarked on or before Election Day will be counted if it arrives after polls close but within a grace period that varies from three to 14 days afterward.
That could change, though. A lawsuit brought by the Republican National Committee aims to bar states from counting ballots that arrive after Election Day. The U.S. Supreme Court will soon announce whether it will hear the case. Trump also used an executive order to pressure states to reject late-arriving ballots — though federal courts have blocked that provision. And several GOP-led states have passed or introduced legislation with the same goal.
Trump even has called for banning mail voting entirely.
Now, postal voting advocates worry the RTO delays could invalidate more ballots and undermine the public’s faith in a practice that’s already in the GOP’s crosshairs.
“In any election year, this would be a concern, right? But it feels particularly threatening this year when we’ve seen multiple attacks on vote by mail as a process,” said Alexia Kemerling, director of accessible democracy at the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD). “I worry that these process changes could reduce people’s trust in the system and give more fuel to the fire that — rather than just investing in making this process as accessible and efficient as possible — we should just get rid of it entirely.”
The check is in the mail? Better check that.
When you drop a letter into the mail — whether into your home or office mailbox or a blue postal collection box on the street — it gets picked up by a mail carrier, who then takes it to a nearby post office. Under the old system, in the late afternoon or evening, all the mail collected that day would then be sent to a centralized processing center for sorting and postmarking. From there, it gets sent back to a post office (sometimes via another processing center) and then to its final destination.
So, if you dropped your ballot off before the mail carrier came, you could be pretty confident that it’d be postmarked that same day.
And that’ll still be the case if you live near one of the 60 processing centers across the contiguous 48 states (due to their unique geographies, Alaska and Hawaii operate on postal service standards different from the rest of the states), which are almost all located in or near major cities. But if your local post office is 50 or more miles away from one, now your mail will sit in the post office overnight until being picked up the following morning. The move saves the post office a trip — the morning truck that drops off mail to be delivered in the area will now also pick up the outgoing mail from the day before — and should save an estimated $3.7 billion per year.
But the change will also add at least a day to normal delivery times. For local mail, that was normally two days. Now it’ll be three. And that delay gets compounded if you drop mail off a day before the post office is closed. As the Postal Service noted on a proposed rule published in the Federal Register in August: “RTO-impacted volume that first enters postal possession on a Saturday may be processed (and, as appropriate, postmarked by the automated machinery) the following Monday—a gap of two days.”
USPS started rolling out RTO as a pilot program in October 2023 and began ramping up in February. When RTO is fully deployed, it’ll change pick-ups at roughly 24,000 of the country’s 33,700 post offices, affecting roughly 149 million Americans across 70% of U.S. zip codes. As of September, the changes have been made at 9,504 post offices.
It’s unclear what areas will be impacted next or when USPS will finish implementing the program, said Steven Hutkins, a retired New York University professor who runs savethepostoffice.com. But at USPS’ current pace, Hutkins estimates it’ll take until the middle of 2027 to finish the implementation.
DeJoy left the Postal Service in March, but the DFA initiative has continued under new Postmaster General David Steiner, another Trump ally.
The USPS made the potential impacts clear in August when it proposed a new rule on postmarks in the Federal Register.
“The RTO initiative will make the scenario where a postmark date does not align with the date that the Postal Service first accepted possession of a mailpiece more common,” the proposal states, while noting that postmarks are commonly used by “third parties” like courts, banks, insurers, utilities, and election officials to confirm compliance with deadlines.
But the Postal Service’s Inspector General has warned that it hasn’t done nearly enough to publicize the change.
“The Postal Service did not provide adequate communication to local post office customers affected by the LTO implementation of the impacts on PME service commitments,” a report in August found. “The impacts were exacerbated as retail clerks were not provided training on how to accurately advise customers.”
Another in September criticized a lack of signage notifying customers of the RTO changes at post office locations.
Barbara Smith Warner, executive director of the National Vote At Home Institute, said the agency should have specifically targeted mail voters with its public communications about the RTO. Instead, she said, it has relied on “already overburdened” local election officials to get the word out to voters.
“It’s frustrating,” Warner said. “I value the Postal Service and their ability to continue doing this really critical public service — I do. But I do wish that they could acknowledge that ballots are a different thing.”
USPS has released two press releases related to RTO this year — on par with the number they publish for each new commemorative stamp — but neither clearly warns about the one-to-three day delays. It also made a “pointed response” to the PRC’s critical report.
Some state and local election administrators are warning voters about the mail delays.
Officials in California sent out a release earlier this month, ahead of November’s critical vote on a ballot measure to authorize congressional redistricting. In Washington state, an early vote-by-mail adopter, USPS officials proactively notified the secretary of state, said Dalton, who then put out a voter-outreach plan to county officials.
In Virginia, state election officials met with AAPD local affiliates in September about notifying the disabled community, Kemerling said.
The National Vote At Home Institute is similarly working to get the word out, Warner said. But most voters simply aren’t paying attention yet. “It’s all very hard,” she said. “It’s all very challenging.”
Still, the changes even have some postal voting advocates question some of their positions. Warner’s organization has long pushed for states to adopt rules with generous grace periods for late-arriving ballots, in order to widen access to voting.
But now the group may be rethinking that.
“If at the same time this is going on, the Postal Service is being very clear about, ‘well, you might get your ballot in by election day, but we might not postmark it,’ that feels like a recipe for disaster,” Warner said.
Making it harder to vote by mail will disproportionately impact the nation’s 40 million disabled eligible voters, said AAPD’s Kemerling, noting that there’s a disability turnout gap.
“They’re a part of every single community and every political party. And mail in ballots are used across every political background. So there’s really no partisan angle to this, in my opinion — or there shouldn’t be.” Kemerling said.
“This is really good evidence why states should slow down the ballot counting process and allow for a couple extra days for ballots to [arrive],” she added. “I know there’s a desire to get the results as fast as possible, but I think it is a disservice if we are potentially leaving out folks and leaving out eligible votes.”
Republicans may weep as they reap what they sowed
Ironically, it’s GOP voters who could be most at risk of having their mail-in ballots spiked for arriving late. Because USPS processing centers are mostly located in or around big cities, RTO’s impacts will be felt mainly in Republican-leaning rural areas.
As the Postal Regulatory Commission, an USPS oversight body, noted in a report, the “proposal has significant negative impacts on rural communities throughout the United States.”
The September Inspector General report similarly found that “implementation in the New Orleans region resulted in a decrease in service that disproportionately impacted rural communities.”
Hutkins estimates that out of the roughly 8,000 zip codes within 50 miles of a processing center, 6,000 are mostly urban, while the overwhelming majority of zip codes 50+ miles away from a center are rural — 17,300 out of 23,450.
Hutkins, who has mapped out RTO’s impact, said it’s clear the changes have political ramifications.
“If you track all this through congressional districts… it’s the red states that are hit big time,” he said.
Estimated percentage of population impacted by USPS cuts in Congressional districts represented by Republicans
Estimated percentage of population impacted by USPS cuts in Congressional districts represented by Democrats
Still, the partisan impact could be evened out somewhat by the fact that Democrats are still more likely to vote by mail than Republicans. Last year, nearly 10 million mail votes were cast by Democrats, while nearly 8 million were cast by Republicans, according to figures compiled by the University of Florida’s Election Lab. (The figures only looked at the 26 states that reported party registration data).
The RTO changes could play a role in big elections this year. In New Jersey, where the GOP hopes to pull off an upset in the gubernatorial race, the RTO impacts are clustered in the northwest and southern parts of the state — rural areas home to many Republican voters. In Virginia, where polls show the attorney general contest in a virtual tie, the blue DC suburbs and Richmond aren’t affected by RTO, while the redder parts of the state are. And in Pennsylvania, home to a critical judicial retention election, the Democratic poles in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh won’t see delays, but the “Alabama in between” of the commonwealth will.
Neither the Virginia Department of Elections nor the New Jersey Division of Elections responded to a request for comment.
In an email, a spokesman from Pennsylvania’s secretary of state wrote: “The Department encourages all counties to engage with their mail ballot vendors and local postal officials to ensure the expedient delivery of mail ballots…. The Department encourages voters to return their ballots as soon as possible after they receive them.”