Postal Service delays put tens of thousands of WA ballots at risk of rejection, research finds

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: There's still time to return your ballot for the 2026 general election, but if you're planning to vote by mail, you may want to hurry. That's according to a research brief posted Oct. 21 by a team led by the University of Washington, which found that ongoing changes to U.S.

Postal Service mail processes could double the percentage of ballots that arrive too late to be counted. Researchers estimate the mail delays could cause tens of thousands of otherwise valid ballots to be rejected. These mail delays disproportionately affect rural voters and those in outlying suburban communities.

"This could affect 20,000 or more voters who put their ballots in the mail ahead of Election Day," said research lead Scott W. Allard, professor of public policy and governance at the UW. "That may sound like a small number of voters in the grand scheme of things, but it could be really consequential, particularly in rural and outer suburban communities." The research brief—part of a broader study of mail-in ballots led by the UW Evans School of Public Policy and Governance—has not yet been peer-reviewed.

Researchers plan to submit it to an academic journal in the coming months. State law requires every ballot postmarked by Election Day to be counted. That system relied on the Postal Service's practice of postmarking mail on the date it's received.

But new policies first rolled out in October 2023 shifted how the agency collects and processes mail. Under the Regional Transportation Optimization (RTO) program—part of an agencywide modernization effort announced in 2021—mail in ZIP codes more than 50 miles (80 kilometers) from a regional center is collected only once a day. That mail may not be postmarked until it reaches a processing facility, which could be the next day or even later.

RTO was implemented in about two dozen Washington ZIP codes in February 2024 and has since been expanded to cover a large portion of the state. Rural voters are particularly likely to live in an RTO ZIP code, including over 90% of rural voters who voted in the 2024 general election. To project the delays' effects on ballot rejection rates, researchers analyzed voter-level ballot data and county-level rejection data from the Washington secretary of state.