The Postal Service processed and delivered 135 million ballots during the 2020 election

The Postal Service released a post-election analysis outlining the steps it took to deliver a historic number of ballots and Election Mail volume.

“Throughout the 2020 election, the Postal Service faced unprecedented challenges, but the commitment of our 644,000 men and women to deliver the nation’s ballots securely and in a timely manner never wavered, even in the face of the pandemic,” said Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.

Here are some of the key performance statistics from the general election mailing season:

• USPS delivered 99.89 percent of ballots to election officials within one week. Overall, 99.89 percent of identified ballots mailed after Sept. 4 were delivered within seven days, consistent with the Postal Service’s recommendation to voters. Based on internal processing scores, employees delivered 97.9 percent of ballots mailed from voters to election officials within three days and delivered 99.7 percent within five days.

• The average delivery time for ballots mailed from voters to election officials was 1.6 days. While the average delivery time for First-Class Mail, the class of mail by which nearly all ballots from voters are mailed, was 2.5 days in October, ballots generally traveled even faster. On average, the Postal Service delivered ballots from election officials to voters in 2.1 days and ballots from voters to election officials in 1.6 days.

• Political Mail and Election Mail volume exceeded 4.6 billion pieces. Total mail volume surpassed 4.6 billion mailpieces for both Political Mail and Election Mail tracked, representing a 114 percent increase above the 2016 election cycle levels.

• The Postal Service processed and delivered 135 million ballots. USPS delivered at least 135 million ballots, including both blank ballots delivered from election officials to voters and completed ballots returning from voters to election officials. This figure includes only those ballots that were properly identified as ballots using the correct electronic identifiers, and does not include many of the ballots that the Postal Service diverted from its processing network or otherwise handled outside of normal processes in an effort to accelerate delivery.

With two runoff elections for the U.S. Senate in Georgia scheduled for Jan. 5, 2021, the Postal Service remains laser-focused on fulfilling its essential role for the election officials and voters who use the mail as part of the voting process.

The report will be supplemented following the completion of the Georgia runoff elections.

From the election report:

As the Postal Service was making these structural improvements and formalizing and implementing these policies and procedures, it was confronted with one more hurdle: lawsuits in a variety of federal courts. These suits were largely premised on, at worst, a baseless assertion that the Postmaster General was intentionally slowing down the mail to interfere with the election, or, at best, the unsupported notion that the Postal Service was unwilling or unable to efficiently deliver the nation’s election mail.

Four different courts issued nationwide preliminary injunctions in seven different cases. While the preliminary injunctions that these lawsuits prompted were largely consistent with the Postal Service’s practices and policies, they required the Postal Service to generate and produce data and reports, to certify compliance with existing policies, and to make postal officials available for depositions and other discovery demands.

The Postal Service complied with these orders, but they were undoubtedly a distraction for the organization, requiring the diversion of resources and keeping critical postal leadership from their primary duty of ensuring that the nation’s election mail was being handled expeditiously. The lawsuits were, in short, another unexpected barrier that the Postal Service had to overcome in carrying out its role or the 2020 election.