With Election Day approaching, experts are urging voters to take their mail-in ballots to official election drop boxes or mail them at least a week in advance and request a same-day postmark amid changes to post office policy.
As SFist reported in June, election experts have been urging voters to avoid last-minute mail-in ballots amid concerns that changes to US Postal Service operations could delay postmarks and put valid votes at risk of rejection.
For those who still plan to mail their ballots, Alexander Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, told KPIX she recommends sending them at least a week before Election Day.
“That may seem kind of extreme, but we are seeing mail taking a longer time to arrive,” Alexander said.
Voters who wait longer to mail their ballots can take them to a post office counter and request a manual, same-day postmark at no charge to help establish when the Postal Service received them. Ballots with valid postmarks and signatures are typically counted when they're delivered within seven days after Election Day.
Voters can also bypass the mail by returning ballots to official drop boxes or delivering them directly to their county elections office.
San Francisco voter Jeremy Rosenberg told KPIX he deliberately avoided putting his ballot in a USPS mailbox and instead used an official ballot drop box because of concerns about the recent federal postal changes and President Donald Trump’s vocal criticism of mail-in voting.
“The country is in crisis. We have to make our voices heard,” Rosenberg said, speaking to KPIX.
Another San Francisco voter, Jeanette Rogas, said using an election drop box gave her greater confidence that her ballot would arrive in time to be counted.
“I felt like this is the one for certain way that I knew my vote is going to get counted on time,” Rogas told KPIX.
The concerns follow California’s June primary, when 148,241 returned mail-in ballots were rejected, representing about 1.73% of all returned ballots, as the Associated Press reported in July. More than 93,000 were discarded because they arrived late, while nearly 44,000 had signatures that did not match county records and more than 8,300 were missing signatures.
According to KPIX, a recent report from the Public Policy Institute of California found that ballots were more commonly rejected from communities located farther from postal processing centers or where mail pickup frequency had been reduced.
The June rejections have also fueled political disputes over California’s election process, particularly after late-counted ballots changed some results weeks after Election Day. Trump has criticized the state’s counting process, while state officials have said the extended timeline is required by law to give counties time to verify and count eligible ballots.
In March, Trump issued an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to compile state-by-state lists of eligible voters and the Justice Department to prioritize prosecuting election officials who send mail-in ballots to ineligible voters. As SFist reported in August, the order has faced legal challenges, and the Supreme Court recently allowed one part to proceed for now, while warning that future actions to implement it may still be unlawful.
More recently, the federal administration has been targeting immigrants accused of voting illegally, including 28 in California.
The site Rolling Out recommends that voters utilize the state’s free BallotTrax tracking system to make sure their votes were counted.
Previously: Tens of Thousands of June Mail-In Ballots Tossed, Many Due to USPS’s New Postmark Policy
