The United States Postal Service has announced a proposed new section to its mailing standards that would have a major impact on the return of mail-in ballots, as it would shift the responsibility to the voter to confirm the exact receival date by the postal service.

USPS realizes that with their new mail processing system, the postmark is no longer proof of the date that it received a piece of mail. Their solution is to make the customer — in the case of ballots the voter — responsible for confirming the receipt date of their piece of mail. It will be up to the voter to obtain proof of date of receipt, or without it, a ballot may not be counted.

“While the presence of a postmark on a mailpiece confirms that the postal service was in possession of the mailpiece on the date of the postmark’s inscription, the postmark date does not inherently or necessarily align with the date on which USPS first accepted possession of a mailpiece,” the proposal notes.

Voters can confirm the exact date that the postal service first accepted possession of their ballot in various ways. The customer can hand the ballot or mail to a postal clerk at the post office and request a manual postmark, purchase a “Certificate of Mailing,” or pay extra for registered or certified mail.

The postal service’s postmark has been considered the mail date for payments by mail, filing taxes, and other legal documents and, in 19 states and Washington, D.C., the mail date for mail-in ballots that are to be mailed by Election Day.

Recent Changes to Mail Processing System

Now, USPS is making a distinction between the postmark and what they are calling the “First Accepted Possession” of a piece of mail. The postmark only confirms that the postal service had possession of the mail on that date, not that it received the mail on that date.

This proposal is necessitated by the implementation of USPS’s mail stream restructuring, Delivering for America, that was introduced in 2021. Under this system, a piece of mail may have entered the mail stream several days before the postmark is applied. All mail is now being processed at regional postal facilities, where the postmark is applied by machines — not at local post offices. Mail can be held at the local post office or the regional postal facility for a number of days. This delay is exacerbated by weekends, holidays, and rural areas that are far from a regional postal facility.

Voters’ New Responsibility

Delivering for America has been a disaster, as previously reported in The Federalist. Since it began, every USPS Inspector General report about the regional processing facilities, most recently the St. Louis region, has been extremely critical, with reporting about delayed and mishandled mail and other issues.

President Donald Trump understands the vulnerabilities in voting by mail and recognizes the potential for election fraud. He issued Executive Order 14248 addressing these concerns and has made recent comments going even further, calling for the elimination of voting by mail. Eliminating, or drastically limiting voting by mail, and requiring that all ballots be received by Election Day, as he has suggested, would make USPS’s proposal about the postmark irrelevant.

The Postal Service has become the largest precinct in our elections and their system is not set up to handle the burden of receiving and delivering millions of ballots.

This issue with postmarks is just one more reason why we should limit voting by mail to absentee voting with an excuse. Additionally, the 20 states that use the postmark by Election Day to count a ballot should join the other 28 states that require ballots to be received by Election Day, regardless of the postmark.