New data reported by the U.S. Postal Service showed nearly 300,000 ballots were never scanned for delivery the day before Election Day.
The 295,838 ballots that weren’t scanned were spread across the country. The largest concentration of unscanned ballots was in the Postal Service’s Pacific region — Los Angeles alone had nearly 46,000 unscanned ballots. Salt Lake City, Utah, had the second-highest number of unscanned ballots with 30,146.
As of this week, USPS said there were some 300,000 ballots that lacked a delivery scan (USPS Data, 11/2) pic.twitter.com/RCXm9cOGGz
— John Kruzel (@johnkruzel) November 4, 2020
On Tuesday, the Postal Service said similar figures misrepresented the service’s delivery rates after it reported fewer on-time ballot deliveries for the fifth day in a row, claiming that the data was “not reliable.”
Dave Partenheimer, the manager of media relations with the U.S. Postal Service, told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday that the data came from the service’s daily court filings. “Those are not reliable numbers. The data ordered and being provided to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on a daily basis are processing scores which are different than our normal service performance scores,” he said.
Parenheimer added that the data submitted in the court records lack sufficient context. He said it doesn’t take into consideration the collection or delivery of mail, what the post office calls the “first mile” and “last mile.” The processing data reportedly only involves when the mail is processed internally.
“In addition, the ballot data in our daily reports represent only those ballots we are able to identify and measure by use of Intelligent Mail Barcode with Ballot identifier,” Parenheimer said. “If a ballot was entered without these identifiers, it is not measured in the count and therefore is not representative of all ballots in the mail system. Many ballots are traveling outside of our normal processing network to be expedited per our extraordinary measures, like local turnaround, and these numbers don’t capture those ballots.”
The Postal Service will likely answer questions related to the unscanned ballots in a Wednesday afternoon court hearing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
On Tuesday, Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the service to conduct an “all clear” sweep of facilities in key battleground states to ensure that all ballots were delivered before polls closed on election night.
The ruling was the result of a lawsuit brought by a number of groups, including Vote Forward and several Latino community groups. The groups claimed that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s cost-cutting measures were disenfranchising minority voters by slowing down mail service. It’s the second order handed down by Sullivan this week pertaining to the Postal Service.
The Postal Service failed to comply with the court order. The Justice Department said that “doing so would be impractical (given the size of that facility) and would take them away from their other pressing Election Mail related responsibilities,” according to a court filing.
“Given the time constraints set by this Court’s order, and the fact that Postal Inspectors operate on a nationwide basis, Defendants were unable to accelerate the daily review process to run from 12:30pm to 3:00pm without significantly disrupting preexisting activities on the day of the Election, something which Defendants did not understand the Court to invite or require,” the filing read.
The Washington Examiner reached out to the Postal Service for further comment.
