Making Votes Count: USPS Ensures Timely Delivery Of Ballots

by Thomas Foti, VP Product Solutions
U.S. Postal Service

The right to vote is one of our country’s most cherished freedoms, and the Postal Service is proud of our role in ensuring the safe, secure and timely delivery of every ballot entrusted to us.

Every year, we embrace this civic duty, whether in high-profile presidential elections or in off-season cycles like last year’s, when we handled more than 28 million ballots for state and local elections across the nation*.

I am pleased to share that in the 2021 election cycle, we maintained the very highest performance standards.

We have put together an overview that demonstrates the reliability and security of mail-in ballots in 2021. In that spirit, I want to take this opportunity to applaud the hard-working women and men of the Postal Service for delivering 99.31 percent of all completed ballots within three days, 99.89 percent within five days and 99.95 percent within seven days.

Overall, ballots sent from voters to election officials in 2021 arrived in an average of 1.4 days.

This level of reliability is a true accomplishment and one I am pleased to say tracks closely with our performance during the 2020 election cycle.

Then, despite an unprecedented volume of 135 million mail-in ballots and the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, we delivered 99.89 percent of all ballots sent by voters to election officials within seven days.

Each election cycle teaches us how we can improve, and we are already applying lessons learned from the past two cycles to prepare for the next one.

As you will see in our 2021 election report, we are strengthening our processes, investing in our people and enhancing our readiness to ensure the highest reliability and performance standards are maintained in future elections.

I am proud to be part of an organization that is conscientious in upholding its civic duties and is serious about ensuring mail-in ballots are handled securely and delivered on time. The Postal Service delivers each and every election.

* The total number of delivered ballots may exceed 28.2 million. These figures include 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.