In early August, election workers north of Spokane, Washington, went across the street to the post office to check for late mail-in ballots. It was three days after the primary and they were expecting no more than a few dozen.
Instead, their mailbox was brimming with envelopes — more than 500 of them, each a vote that wouldn’t count. The sight was “jarring,” said Auditor Lori Larsen, a Republican who oversees voting in Stevens County.
Across the region, other election officials were getting similar jolts. In the 11 predominately rural counties in eastern Washington, nearly 2,000 ballots came in late, compared to about 600 in 2022, the previous midterm primary.
In recent weeks, concerns about mail-in voting disruptions have focused almost entirely on President Donald Trump’s now-shelved plan to sharply restrict who can vote by mail.
But a ProPublica data analysis shows that delays resulting from the U.S. Postal Service’s cost-cutting measures have endangered the validity of ballots cast in rural areas, not only in Washington, but across the country.
Over the past three years, as mail volume continued to plummet and annual deficits ballooned, the Postal Service started consolidating the processing of first-class mail at larger regional plants instead of at smaller hubs closer to local post offices. Then, in a little-noted switch that mostly took effect after the 2024 election, the agency cut the frequency of mail pickups in half at many post offices 50 miles or more from these processing plants, from twice daily to once.
The changes often added a day or more to delivery time and, most importantly for ballots, pushed back postmarking, which doesn’t happen until mail reaches the regional centers.
In this year’s primary, the effects of the cuts were clearest in five states that make detailed data on mail-in ballots available: Washington, California, Ohio, North Carolina and Oregon. All have or recently had grace periods allowing ballots to count if they come in after Election Day as long as they’re postmarked by the deadline.
In these states, the number of ballots rejected for arriving late soared in counties affected by the service changes compared to 2022, ProPublica’s analysis showed.
Rejection rates in counties where services were cut doubled or tripled from what they were four years ago, dwarfing any increases in counties where postal pickups remained as they were, our analysis showed. In urban Spokane, for example, the number of ballots rejected for being late actually dropped this year.
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Across the five states, the delays have had the most substantial effect in areas that voted for Trump in 2024, ProPublica’s analysis shows. In Washington, Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, a Democrat, said he sees the service changes directed by Republican appointees leading the Postal Service as a way to undermine mail-in voting.
“I don’t think they realized how much it was going to affect their voter base,” he said, adding that Washington has “a lot of rural Republican voters.”
Postal Service leaders say such delays are less likely in the Nov. 3 general election because of “extraordinary measures” the agency puts into place for these votes, when there’s typically far more turnout. They have circulated a memo to the nation’s more than 30,000 post offices saying that for the 10 days before the election, managers should separate completed ballots from other first-class mail and deliver those intended for local election offices the day they come in.
At an Oct. 15 news conference, Postal Service leaders emphasized the agency’s longstanding recommendation that voters mail ballots back at least a week before their states’ deadlines, while defending the agency’s ability to fast-track ballots through the system.
“We work to identify and address issues quickly,” said Amber McReynolds, chair of the Postal Service board of governors, “so ballots can continue to move swiftly from election offices to voters and from voters back to election offices.”
Election consultants, researchers and former Postal Service officials told ProPublica that the guidance for the upcoming vote gave more detailed directions on how to expedite ballots. They said they hoped the agency’s special measures would limit delays, but some said mistakes were likely.
“I don’t think we can say with any kind of conviction that there will be no ballots rejected,” said Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer of the National Association of Election Officials. “It isn’t a question of ‘if,’ but a question of ‘how many.’”
A pilot program instituting the delivery changes in 18 regions before the 2024 election ran into problems. An audit by the Postal Service’s inspector general found that agency staff in these areas sometimes didn’t handle ballots correctly, mainly because instructions weren’t clearly communicated. (A Postal Service spokesperson said “learnings from the pilot” have been applied as the program has expanded.)
After this year’s primary, reports by media outlets noted that mail-in ballot rejection rates were higher than in the past, but ProPublica’s analysis shows these increases were directly connected to Postal Service changes. Research published in September by the Brookings Institution also found this connection, projecting that if the pattern held in the general election, tens of thousands of mail-in ballots could be rejected.
At least seven closely contested congressional districts — including Washington’s 3rd, California’s 22nd and North Carolina’s 11th — are in areas that were affected by service changes in the primary, ProPublica found.
Elena Patel, who conducted the Brookings analysis, said service changes may still imperil mail-in votes in the general election.
“I think there remain risks to ballots,” she said, adding that the Postal Service’s plan for the general election “depends on flawless execution.”
Mail-in voting has become more popular over the last decade, with many states broadening access to it during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Nearly 1 in 3 Americans voted this way in 2022 and 2024. Trump himself frequently votes by mail, and in recent weeks has started to encourage his supporters to do so as well, though he has claimed without evidence that the process is rife with fraud.
The Postal Service has mostly ensured the timely delivery of hundreds of millions of ballots, even as mail volume overall has dropped 50% from its high in 2006.
When Louis DeJoy was appointed postmaster general in spring 2020, he inherited an $81 billion operating deficit and rapidly took steps such as eliminating overtime to reduce costs, under pressure from Trump and others in his administration. (DeJoy did not respond to questions from ProPublica.)
The NAACP sued that August, alleging the measures could affect mail-in votes in that year’s general election. Courts ordered DeJoy to reverse some of the cuts and the Postal Service agreed to implement special procedures to ensure ballots weren’t delayed. The Postal Service has continued following those procedures since.
Still, DeJoy went forward with a 10-year restructuring plan designed to save the agency billions. It ended evening pickups from some post offices, often in rural areas. Trucks serving these places travel long distances and at times were mostly empty. This part of the plan — called regional transportation optimization, or RTO — was projected to eventually save the Postal Service $4 billion a year.
The agency announced the national rollout of the RTO plan in 2024, but DeJoy agreed to pause it leading up to that year’s November election, leaving only about 4,000 ZIP codes in the pilot project affected by the service changes.
In January 2025, the Postal Regulatory Commission, which oversees the Postal Service, warned that moving forward with the plan would be disruptive to rural communities and might not save as much money as expected. The Postal Service rolled out the reductions anyway, extending the changes to almost 20,000 ZIP codes to date. Officials said they expect the system to be fully implemented within two years.
This January, the agency put out a statement saying the transportation cuts would mean it took longer for mail, including ballots, to be postmarked and delivered. But the Postal Service didn’t specify which voters would be affected by the slowdowns and which wouldn’t.
Though the delay from RTO is often only a day, mail can be delayed longer if it’s deposited in a mailbox after the daily pickup time, or just before Sunday or a holiday.
A Postal Service spokesperson said the agency told election officials that RTO would change schedules and reemphasized the need for voters to get their ballots in the mail at least a week ahead of time. Election officials in Washington said the Postal Service wasn’t direct enough about the fact that the changes would lead to delays in delivering and postmarking ballots.
“What they said was, ‘We are going to change the way we do postmarks,’” said Hobbs, Washington’s secretary of state. “That was it.”
Patel, the Brookings analyst and a former Postal Regulatory Commission employee, said that more direct communication to voters could have helped change their behavior. “That’s the part that I think has not been super transparent about the whole process,” she said.
Many of the areas that saw a spike in late ballots were in Western states, which were the earliest and most enthusiastic adopters of expanded mail-in voting.
In 2004, Washington became the second state to start conducting all-mail elections, in which every eligible voter automatically receives a mail-in ballot. Most residents vote by putting their ballots in drop boxes. Still, in 2024, about 33% put them in the mail.
In the 30 mostly rural Washington counties most affected by RTO, the percentage of ballots postmarked late more than tripled compared to the 2022 primary, ProPublica found.
In Garfield County, in southeastern Washington, 19 ballots — nearly 1 in 10 cast — had late postmarks this year. In 2022, only a single ballot was postmarked late. In Pend Oreille County, in northeast Washington along the Idaho panhandle, 6% of ballots were rejected for arriving late, compared to 1% in the 2022 primary.
“It was pretty awful telling people we couldn’t count their votes,” said Marianne Nichols, Pend Oreille’s longtime auditor. “They were quite upset because they felt like, ‘Why? This was in the mailbox on election day, the post office picked it up and had it.’ They felt like it should have counted.”
In Stevens County, the percentage of ballots rejected for having a late postmark jumped to 8%, from 1% in 2022.
Steve Hutkins, a retired professor who analyzes the effect of Postal Service changes on Savethepostoffice.com, also found that places in Washington with RTO had more ballot rejections during local elections earlier this year for school board and other measures. The patterns “set off the alarm bells,” he said.
Stuart Holmes, the state’s director of elections, said he reached out to Postal Service officials to find out what had happened, but got few answers and no specifics on delays related to RTO, which were a “total surprise,” he said.
Election officials in California and Oregon also reported thousands more ballots rejected for arriving late during their primaries. Counties affected by RTO, including Kern County, California, had substantially higher rates of ballots rejected for mail-related reasons, ProPublica found.
Kern County’s assistant registrar of voters, Laura Cantu, said election officials are urging rural voters to use drop boxes to cast their ballots in the general election.
The expansion of RTO had a similar effect in North Carolina and Ohio, where the rates of late ballots were about twice as high in counties affected by the restructuring as rates in counties that weren’t. Since 2022, these states have also eliminated grace periods in which ballots postmarked by Election Day could count even if they arrived later. Voters unused to the tighter deadlines also could have contributed to an increase in late ballots.
ProPublica didn’t find any association between RTO and higher rates of late ballots in Wisconsin, even though clerks reported delays involving mail-in ballots cast in its state election, held this spring. (Other Postal Service changes may have contributed to the delays.)
Wisconsin’s data does not distinguish ballots sent by mail from those cast in drop boxes or in person, making it impossible to definitively measure rejection rates just for ballots returned by mail. Election researchers said Wisconsin’s deadline for mail ballots, which must come into election offices by 8 p.m. on Election Day, also probably had an effect.
“If you know that you don’t have a grace period, it probably affects voter behavior,” said Patel, the Brookings researcher.
Recent Postal Service audits have found that RTO-related changes had saved the agency about $2.8 billion by the end of fiscal year 2025 — less money than expected — and are slowing down all first-class mail, not just ballots. Residents of rural areas are waiting longer for everything from prescriptions to bills, a report published in September by the Postal Service’s inspector general said.
A Postal Service spokesperson still defended the plan, both for financial reasons and to adjust to the changing marketplace. “These savings are both significant and necessary,” he said.
In the lead-up to Nov. 3, the agency’s plan is to route ballots meant for local election offices to a nearby postal facility or directly to their destination. They shouldn’t go to regional plants, which the Postal Service says should minimize delays.
Larsen, the Stevens County auditor, is encouraging Washington voters to deposit their ballots in drop boxes rather than relying on the mail. Since the primary, she’s increased the number of red, white and blue drop boxes that sit outside government buildings from seven to 12. Near each box, there’s a large sign encouraging people to take selfies when they vote and send the photos to Larsen.
In prior years, Larsen said, she avoided telling voters how or when to vote, concerned they might regret choices they made if critical information later emerged about the candidates. That’s no longer uppermost in her mind.
“Now we are more concerned that we get your ballot,” she said.
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