Postal Service must sweep NC processing centers for mail-in ballots, judge says
A federal judge has ordered the U.S. Postal Service to sweep its North Carolina facilities for missing mail-in ballots and deliver them to local elections officials by 5 p.m. Friday.
The order is one of two signed by a judge in Washington, D.C., on Thursday that requires the Postal Service’s cooperation as states continue to tally mail-in and absentee ballots that will decide the presidential election. The first requires the postal districts of Greensboro and Mid-Carolina as well as several in Pennsylvania to search their facilities twice on Friday for mail-in ballots.
The Greensboro district covers the northern portion of North Carolina, including Raleigh, according to court documents filed by USPS. The Mid-Carolina district spans the southern portion of the state, including Charlotte.
“USPS employees of each facility shall be directed to undertake a sweep of the facility on the morning and again on the afternoon of November 6 to identify all inbound ballots,” the order states.
A second court order also filed Thursday requires all mail processing facilities in states with extended deadlines for receiving mail-in ballots — such as North Carolina — to perform two daily sweeps for missing ballots until the deadline passes and have them properly delivered.
The local facilities will also be required to notify USPS headquarters of how many ballots they found during those sweeps.
The orders are part of a larger lawsuit brought against the Postal Service and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy over decisions made over the summer that contributed to a nationwide mail delay and prompted concerns about the timely delivery of mail-in ballots, the Associated Press reported.
During the course of the legal proceedings, the AP reported Postal Service data showed “300,000 mail-in ballots in several states had not received scans showing they had been delivered.”
U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan subsequently ordered USPS to search its facilities in 27 states for the missing ballots before Tuesday afternoon — a deadline the Postal Service missed, Buzzfeed News reported.
The Postal Service has since disputed that 300,000 ballots figure, adding that it was unlikely so many ballots could have been misplaced, The Washington Post reported. Officials also said some pieces of mail set aside for expedited delivery weren’t scanned.
“In no uncertain terms, I’m not pleased about the 11th-hour development last night,” Sullivan said during a hearing Wednesday, according to Buzzfeed. “You can tell your clients that — and someone might have a price to pay. If it was not possible as a practical matter for my order to be compiled with, it was the government’s job to tell me that so I could make appropriate adjustments to the order.”
In addition to the nationwide sweep, Sullivan ordered the Postal Service to submit data about the election mail received at its processing centers — including the processing scores of inbound and outbound ballots at each of its facilities.
According to the data provided, the Greensboro facility processed 72.55% of the more than 6,000 ballots it received on Election Day. The Mid-Carolina district reportedly processed 79.48% of the roughly 3,500 ballots it received that day.
Nationally, the Postal Service processed about 93% of ballots on Election Day, meaning “nearly 7% of ballots in U.S. Postal Service sorting facilities on Tuesday were not processed on time for submission to election officials,” The Washington Post reported.
Voting experts say the timely processing rate should be at least 97% to meet expected goals, according to the Post.
“We know yesterday that if the sweeps were doing their job, mail that was identified as ballots and were in the system should have been pulled out and delivered, and it may be that affects what we see as the scores,” Allison Zieve, an attorney representing one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit told the Post on Wednesday. “The problem is, in part because of the timing and in part because they haven’t given us all the information we asked for, it’s hard to know whether the numbers we saw today — the low scores for example in Atlanta and Central Pennsylvania — it’s hard to assess how big a problem that is.”
The Postal Service also responded Thursday to reports that four days of mail-in ballots were sitting on a loading dock in its Greensboro facility, a reporter for Courthouse News Service said on Twitter. Officials said no such ballots were found.
“Defendants further confirm that on November 4, 2020, the Greensboro Plant manager walked the facility and did not locate any boxes of ballots,” the Postal Service said in a notice to the court on Thursday.
This story was originally published November 5, 2020 at 5:11 PM with the headline "Postal Service must sweep NC processing centers for mail-in ballots, judge says."
