Postal Service reassures on mail ballots, says all centers operating in regions hit by hurricanes

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — The U.S. Postal Service has reopened all of its mail processing centers in areas of Florida and North Carolina hit by recent hurricanes, a top official said Wednesday in a briefing meant to reassure voters and election officials that the agency is ready to handle mail ballots.

The Postal Service held the virtual meeting less than two weeks before the Nov. 5 election and six weeks after state and local election officials warned that problems with mail service threatened to disenfranchise voters. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy later responded that the Postal Service makes "heroic efforts” to get even ballots mailed late to election offices on time.

Even after Hurricane Helene in late September and Hurricane Milton this month, 99.9% of the nation's election-related mail was delivered within seven days, the Postal Service reported Wednesday. It said 99.7% of the election-related mail was delivered within three days for the last presidential election in 2020.

“We have the capacity to handle a high volume of election mail in the final weeks of the election,” said Steven Monteith, a Postal Service executive vice president and its chief marketing officer.

Monteith said all the processing centers in North Carolina were back in operation as of Tuesday, as were all of Florida's centers. He said mail can be delivered to all but 4,600 addresses in North Carolina and about 600 in Florida.

It's not clear how many voters in the hardest-hit areas will return their ballots by mail. Early in-person voting has gotten off to a strong start in North Carolina, where election officials have taken a number of steps to make voting as accessible as possible for voters affected by the storms. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has extended early voting to Election Day for certain counties and modified deadlines for election supervisors to send out mail ballots.

As of Tuesday, the Postal Service had moved retail sites in eight communities and brought mobile units into another 13 in western North Carolina around Asheville and Charlotte. It moved 10 retail sites in the Tampa-St. Petersburg metropolitan area and another three in and around Fort Myers.

Monteith said a “full recovery” of mail service from the hurricanes “may stretch forward for some time,” but that people still can pick up mail at post offices or mobile units. He said mail that had been undelivered because of the hurricanes is being moved to them.

“The nation’s postal network is operating effectively without any major reported disruptions,” Monteith said.

During a separate Monday briefing, Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said voters can take some comfort in the fact that election officials are not asking the Postal Service “to be on high, high alert forever and ever."

“We’re asking them for the next 15 days to be on the top of their game,” said Simon, the president of the National Association of Secretaries of State.

In September, NASS and the National Association of State Election Directors sent DeJoy a letter saying that problems with mail delivery hadn't been adequately addressed.

But earlier this month, one vocal critic, Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, a Republican, said a phone call with DeJoy reassured him that the Postal Service would address problems in his state.

Schwab's office reported that at least 697 ballots from the state's August primary election arrived at election offices too late to be counted, and at least another 78 did not have the required postmark. Of those 775 ballots, 79% were from three populous counties, Johnson and Wyandotte counties in the Kansas City area and Douglas County in northeastern Kansas, home to the main University of Kansas campus.

Utah’s Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican who oversees elections in her state, said the state has experienced some problems with mail ballots being routed through Las Vegas and not being postmarked on time. But she said postal workers “understand the urgency and the importance” of on-time delivery.

“Things will go wrong," she said. "But every little thing just feeds that conspiracy monster, right? And it’s so not helpful.”

Postal Service officials are advising voters to mail their ballots at least seven days in advance.

“What we’ve been trying to do, in addition to working with the Postal Service, is to help voters understand that they’re responsible ultimately for their own ballots,” Henderson said.

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Associated Press writer Christina A. Cassidy contributed from Atlanta.