What We Learned About the USPS During Election Week
As the presidential election is now over, this will be the penultimate edition of The Mail. Today's edition is a recap of some of the USPS-related misinformation of the last week, why the USPS needs to improve its election mail tracking process, and the possibility of DeJoy being held in contempt of court. Next week, I'll wrap up the newsletter with some thoughts on what the future holds for the post office.
Even though the newsletter is coming to an end, the future of the zine is undecided. We just mailed out the second edition to everyone yesterday, so look for that in your mailboxes shortly. We really enjoy making it and seeing it out in the world, so we're thinking of ways to keep it going beyond the three editions we're already making. Of course, we'll update you on any developments here and when you can expect the third edition. If you want that as well as past editions, subscribe now.
Thanks to everyone for subscribing to The Mail and the zine. It's been a lot of fun and I've learned a lot. I hope you have too.
The Fix Was In, Until We Won
After a quiet few weeks on the mail-in ballot front, a bizarre few days unfolded last week. Starting on Tuesday, various tweets and media reports made it sound like hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots were still waiting to be delivered, inciting some degree of viral panic on social media which then carried over to the TV networks reporting election results. The conspiracy theories about Louis DeJoy flew across my Twitter feed. The fix, they said, was in.
There was just one problem: none of this was true.
I wrote not one but two explainers at Motherboard last week about all this. If you missed those, go ahead and give them a read. I also made a helpful graphic complete with a mysterious stain in my notebook that may or may not have been from eating every meal at my desk all week.
What was interesting to me about all this was not that false information spread on social media, because of course it did. Instead, I was struck by how readily people I know to be on the left embraced a baseless conspiracy theory about the election being rigged against them at a time when it was far from clear they were going to win. The same bad data was still out there on Thursday and Friday, but by then it was clear Joe Biden would eventually prevail. As the fear of losing subsided, so did the vocal support of conspiracy theories. In fact, by Saturday, crowds of people cheered the USPS as they celebrated Biden's win.
To be sure, the tone and tenor of these theories differed greatly from those we're seeing on the right. And there was a good degree of self-policing as some people actively signal boosted reporting to the contrary, something we don't often see from conservatives or the right. Nevertheless, I spent more time than I care to admit reflecting on this dynamic over the weekend. At least from the vantage point of my beat, the misinformation was coming from all sides.
The USPS Needs To Rethink How It Tracks Ballots
Voting by mail is not new. It dates back to Union soldiers voting from the front in the Civil War. But the scale and scope of it is rapidly expanding. That trend is likely to continue as some states make pandemic-related measures permanent after the country saw record voter turnout despite the pandemic thanks to mail-in voting.
All things considered, the USPS handled ballots pretty well. Overall, we know of only perhaps a few thousand ballots nationwide to have been delayed to the point of being delivered after Election Day. If you told me that would be the case a month or two ago, I would have said that's a best case scenario.
But, the truth of the matter is we simply don't know how the USPS did with election mail. And, even more troublingly, neither does the USPS.
There are three main issues with how the USPS monitors election mail. The first is that it is up to local election officials whether to use trackable barcodes on election mail and, according to the USPS, about a quarter of all election mail does not have these barcodes.
The second is that the special measures the USPS puts in place for expediting ballot delivery removes them from the mailstream which often results in bypassing the very machines that scan and track the mailpieces, rendering the tracking process moot.
The third issue is that even the ballots the USPS can track aren't tracked very well. Over two days, lawyers for the plaintiffs in the USPS lawsuits asked USPS head of election mail Kevin Bray to explain how this all works in exceedingly nerdy detail (at one point, Judge Emmet Sullivan said he's "amazed how much I've learned about how to operate the post office in the past week").
Here's the short version: trackable ballots get scanned and logged when they enter and exit a sorting facility. That means the actual delivery of said ballot—the so-called last mile—is assumed, but never positively confirmed by the USPS itself. Also, ballots that have to travel through multiple sorting facilities—if they're being sent to another state, for example—will get multiple entry and departure scans each time they enter and exit a facility. This makes it impossible for the USPS to know in a short time span exactly how many ballots are delayed, where they are going, and what if anything can be done to expedite them. In other words, the USPS has a big ol' mess of data but little actionable knowledge as a result of it.
This is where the confusion about the supposed missing ballots comes in. Largely, this was the product of bad data the USPS never expected to have to publicly report coming to the public's attention out of the context of just how bad the data actually is.
How could the USPS have such bad data on whether ballots are getting processed and delivered? It's because the USPS is not a data-driven enterprise. In many ways, it resembles General Motors from the 1970s: a top-down, authoritarian management structure driven by tradition and process. I cannot tell you how many times over the last few months I’ve heard the phrase “because that’s how we’ve always done it.” USPS's big bosses set policies, pass them down, and then have middle managers confirm they're implementing the process. The organization reacts to things going wrong, like the 62 ballots found in a Florida facility, rather than proactively dealing with potential problems before they arise. This is how the USPS has worked for decades. And, as you hopefully know by now, little has changed.
For his part, Bray has pretty much laid this all out in various court hearings. "Within the postal network in the way that we talk and execute, it's always the assumption the plant managers are implementing and executing what we're asking them to do." He added that he is "highly focused on the process. It's about putting plans in place and validating those." Apparently, he's not as interested in having real-time proof the ballots are being delivered on time.
In his testimony on October 31, Bray referred to the USPS's election mail process as "tried and true." Indeed, it seems to have worked well enough once again. But as more states use more mail-in ballots as the basis for their elections, it sure would be nice to have something better than a guess as to whether they're getting delivered. There are some things that aren't worth leaving up to chance.
"Someone May Have A Price to Pay for That"
Judge Sullivan is not happy with Louis DeJoy. He kicked off the hearing the day after the election with a stern warning for the defendants.
"I'm not pleased about this 11th hour development last night," Sullivan said. "You can tell your clients that, and someone may have a price to pay for that."
The backstory here only added fuel to the DeJoy conspiracy fire, but the details are not as scandalous as some outlets made it seem in the headlines.
On Election Day, the court ordered the USPS to send postal inspectors or Office of Inspector General officials to conduct sweeps of a few dozen facilities to ensure all present ballots were dispatched for delivery that afternoon. The court ordered the sweeps to be conducted by 3 p.m. EST. After the deadline had already passed, the USPS's lawyers sent an update to the court essentially saying they tried, but didn't do the sweeps.
Now, this wasn't as bad as it sounds from an OMG WHERE ARE THE BALLOTS standpoint. Per USPS policy, facilities do multiple ballot sweeps per day during the height of election season. The facilities in question had already done a sweep at 10 a.m., according to the USPS, but that was before the court issued its order around noon. The next scheduled sweeps were set for 4 to 8 p.m. And, to make a long story short, the USPS said they couldn't wrangle the postal inspectors and OIG staff in time to do them sooner.
But this was bad from a complying with court orders standpoint. I'm no legal expert, but when a judge tells you to do something, it's generally a good idea to do it. And if you believe for whatever reason you cannot, you tell the judge. The USPS did neither, blowing the deadline and then informing the judge the thing he told them to do wasn't done.
After the USPS's lawyer explained everything, Judge Sullivan, almost in disbelief, said it was "just shocking to hear" that nothing was done after the order was issued, and thundered that it amounted to "non-compliance with a very important court order." He then made clear he expects Louis DeJoy to personally answer for the non-compliance in court.
That showdown is still looming. Sullivan and the parties agreed they had more important matters to attend to while some states are still accepting ballots as long as they were postmarked prior to November 4. Once those deadlines pass, they will return to the non-compliance matter.
And Sullivan seems very motivated to do so. Two days later, when discussing a separate matter about a contempt of court order issued in error to one of the lawyers in the case, Sullivan said to him, "I have no contempt for you. The same cannot be said for Louis DeJoy."