Postal Service ramps up for election season, delivering 1.5M pieces of political mail daily in Western Pa.

Call it junk mail if you will, but Jeffrey Hauser takes those political ads piling up daily in your mail seriously.

Less than two weeks before the Nov. 3 election, the Latrobe postmaster demonstrated just how seriously the Postal Service takes the flow of countless campaign mailers and mail-in ballots. The USPS is a national network that has been the lifeblood of communications in America since Ben Franklin was appointed the nation’s first postmaster general in 1775.

Every political mailer and every mail-in ballot is logged in daily and logged out that same day, Hauser said, flipping through a clipboard that had records of the day’s political mail.

“We identify everything, all the political mail, from receipt to delivery,” Hauser said. “We log what comes in and what goes out, the date in and out, the same day. It’s very data driven.”

Locally, the postal system’s Western Pennsylvania District is handling between 1 million and 1.5 million pieces of mail a day as the election draws near. The district extends north and south from Erie to Wheeling, W.Va., and east and west from State College to the Ohio border.

Ordinarily, local post offices in the district see 800,000 pieces of mail a day. Still, the increased volume now is far less than the 2.5 million to 3 million pieces processed on the second Monday before Christmas, Postal Service District spokesman Tad Kelley said.

This year, the volume of political mail is unusually high. Countless mailers from hotly contested races are compounded by Pennsylvania voters taking advantage of the state’s new election law that allows anyone to request a mail-in ballot.

This week, state officials said more than 2.8 million voters have requested mail-in ballots. That number is expected to top 3 million. The deadline to request a mail-in ballot is Oct. 27. As of Wednesday, more than 1.1 million mail-in ballots had been cast in Pennsylvania. Some voters are opting to return their ballots at official drop boxes or at county election offices, but the majority are expected to be returned through the mail.

Nationally, the U.S. Postal Service reports it has delivered more than 100 million blank or completed ballots since early September, Reuters reported Thursday. Overall, the Postal Service so far this campaign season has handled 523 million pieces of election mail — which is 162% more than in the 2016 election.

Taking fire

In recent weeks, both the Postal Service and mail-in balloting have come under fire from President Trump, who claims voting by mail is ripe for fraud.

Although there have been multiple reports of election contractors failing to get ballots in the mail or, in the case of Allegheny County, sending the wrong ballots to nearly 30,000 voters, issues with the Postal Service have been rare.

Nonetheless, questions about its ability to handle the volume of mail-in ballots began circulating late this summer when the Postal Service warned states it could not guarantee all ballots cast by mail would arrive in time to be counted.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy later walked back that warning, saying he was merely cautioning state officials to advise voters to be mindful of mailing their ballots far enough in advance to ensure they could be delivered.

Trump, however, has seized upon isolated reports of mail carriers failing to deliver. Last week, two Pittsburgh-area mail carriers added fuel to his fire when they were arrested and indicted on federal criminal charges for dumping mail.

Such incidents are in no way typical of the tens of thousands of mail carriers across the nation every day, Kelley said.

“In those isolated cases, both individuals were caught and prosecuted,” he said. “Every single day, our employees are out there doing their job and doing it well. They know you protect the sanctity of the mail.”

Ready to deliver

David Dillman, a letter carrier who walks 8 miles a day to deliver mail in Latrobe, said it’s the kind of job where you get to know the people you serve. Some people on his route greet him every day.

“You get to meet a lot of nice people,” the tall, rangy letter carrier said through his face mask as he loaded his cart for the day.

It’s a little heavier than usual with all the political mailers going out this month. But that’s fine with Dillman. It goes with the territory, he said.

The Postal Service has beefed up its game to ensure all the extra mail is delivered on time, Kelley said.

“We’ve got extra transportation and hired election mail coordinators to ID your mail and get it out the day we get it,” he said.

He said concerns that the Postal Service lacks the capacity to handle mail promptly as volume increases during the next 12 days are unfounded.

“Nationally, the Postal Service delivers 433 million pieces of mail on an average day,” Kelley said. “There are 330 million people in the U.S., so if every one of them voted — and voted by mail — that would still be less than what we handle on an average day.”