Washington Monthly: “Under current Postal Service policy, mail dropped in a mailbox gets picked up by letter carriers and taken to the nearest post office. Then, that mail gets put in a truck that takes it to the nearest processing center—usually a huge facility the size of several football fields—where it goes through a machine that determines which post office next receives it. After that, a truck takes the mail from the processing center to the appropriate post office, where letter carriers will pick it up and deliver it. This process has slowed in recent years because many processing centers have been closed due to cost-cutting. Those delays have been exacerbated since DeJoy’s changes, including getting rid of the much-needed sorting machines. The result is that it takes anywhere from two to seven days between the time a ballot is dropped in a mailbox to when it gets delivered to an elections office.”

“Postal union leaders have proposed to ameliorate this problem by cutting out the middleman. Rather than take ballots to mammoth processing plants, letter carriers can pre-sort election mail at local post offices themselves and then deliver those ballots directly to local election boards. The reform would cut ballot delivery time to less than 24 hours instead of either days, a week, or even more. The unions argue that this method of sorting should be temporary, just for seven to 10 days before the election”