Former Vice President Joe Biden won the race for the White House on Saturday, but the counting of mail-in ballots cast in the tightly contested presidential election goes on.
The U.S. Postal Service must continue searching its processing facilities twice a day for missing mail-in ballots in states where they are still being accepted, under a federal judge’s orders aimed at making sure every eligible ballot gets delivered in time.
Those ballots are not expected to change the outcome of the election but will be included in each state's final, certified tally.
U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan began issuing the orders earlier this week after the USPS reported low delivery scores and ballots that appeared to have entered their facilities but perhaps not exited them.
Since then, the USPS has found and delivered thousands of ballots. Sullivan also directed the agency to continue reporting the number of ballots found in the sweeps as well as other performance measures. The sweeps must continue until the state deadlines pass.
Sullivan on Friday ordered the postal service to explain its lowest election mail processing scores, but relieved it from earlier orders to provide daily reports on all first class mail and non-ballot election mail.
Attorneys said documents provided to the court show close to 40,000 ballots were delivered by the postal system on Thursday, as elections officials continued counting ballots in states where the final outcome of the contest between Biden and President Donald Trump still hung in the balance.
In Pennsylvania and North Carolina, two battleground states where the election had not been called for either candidate on Friday, postal workers reported finding 2,243 undelivered ballots during the sweeps Thursday. In each case, the postal service said, the ballots were delivered to local elections offices.
North Carolina is accepting ballots up to nine days late, as long as they were postmarked by Election Day.
Friday was the deadline for mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania, if they were postmarked by 5 p.m. Election Day, under a previous federal ruling upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.
However, late Friday, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito ordered county boards of election in Pennsylvania, “pending further order of the Court,” to keep all ballots received by mail after 8:00 p.m. on November 3 segregated and “in a secure, safe and sealed container separate from other voted ballots,” and that all such ballots, if counted, be counted separately.
About 900 of the ballots found in Philadelphia Thursday were left over from Wednesday, when the elections office closed early and the post office couldn’t deliver them, government attorneys said during a Friday morning hearing with Sullivan.
Sullivan’s order directs processing facility managers in eight states to coordinate with local elections officials to deliver all ballots before the deadline for that state expires. Those states include Illinois, Ohio, Iowa, Maryland, Mississippi, North Dakota, West Virginia and Alaska.
Deadlines for mail-in ballots in 16 states expire over the next two weeks. California has the latest deadline, Nov. 20.
'Appalling' performance scores
Thousands of the ballots delivered by the postal service Thursday “were not processed on time,” said Shankar Duraiswamy, an attorney representing civil rights group Vote Forward in one of four related cases Sullivan is overseeing.
Postal service documents showed 21 regional mail processing facilities had processing scores below 80% on Thursday. Postal service attorneys have argued against using those daily indicators, which they say are not an accurate assessment.
David Berg, representing four voters in one of the cases in Sullivan’s court called the performance scores “appalling” during the hearing Friday.
Data presented by the postal service in the cases has shown a clear divide between the agency’s performance before Louis DeJoy was appointed to the head the postal service and the performance since DeJoy was appointed, Berg said.
In previous documents, the postal service has said processing facilities in states under the court’s scrutiny have been impacted by COVID, and that they’re using employees from other facilities, hiring new employees and paying overtime.
The D.C. cases are among nine filed over the summer when changes made or proposed by DeJoy raised alarm nationwide. While several cases focused specifically on ensuring the surge in mail-in ballots were delivered on time, the NAACP lawsuit was broader.
Allison Zieve, one of the attorneys representing the NAACP, said it also sought to ensure the changes didn’t affect people’s ability to receive important mail items such as medication on time.
“The post office knew this was coming and I think was late to the game in figuring out how to handle it,” Zieve told USA TODAY. “Our impression is that postal workers over the past week were working very hard to process and deliver ballots.”
Tammy Patrick, a former elections official and senior advisor to the elections program at the Democracy Fund, said the majority of ballots were being delivered in between 1-5 days, “with the averaging being a 2-day delivery,” based on information from ballot tracking companies.
No one should be surprised ballots continued arriving in postal processing facilities this week, Patrick said.
If a sweep is done in a Florida processing center, for example, it wouldn’t include the ballots still in route to other states, she said. “If their final destination is a plant in Harrisburg (Pennsylvania), it might be a couple of days after the ballot is put into the mail in Florida before it hits the Harrisburg plant, depending on whether it was put on a truck or put on a plane.”
Patrick said she was frustrated this week to hear people asking where ballots were “being found.”
“They’re literally coming from all over the world,” she said, including from members of the military.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Judge presses USPS to deliver remaining ballots by state deadlines