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: A new post office policy that might sound like a technicality—one truck per day to rural post offices instead of two—could result in the rejection of tens of thousands of mail-in ballots in November, according to a new report from the Brookings Institution. The report, by Brookings senior fellow Elena Patel, examined the implications of the new rule.
Patel estimates that the change could lead to between 43,000 and 55,000 additional ballot rejections nationwide. While that number is small compared with the roughly 158 million voters nationwide, many races are extremely close, and a few votes either way might make all the difference. According to her analysis, the effects will likely be most pronounced in rural areas of the western U.S., where post office service is most likely to become less frequent under the rule and where many states automatically send mail ballots to registered voters.
Last year, the United States Postal Service (USPS) began rolling out a new policy, Regional Transportation Optimization (RTO), to run its transportation network more efficiently. RTO, which covers post offices more than 50 miles (80 kilometers) from the plant that processes their mail, is a response to steadily declining letter volumes: The amount of single-piece first-class mail has fallen from 57 billion pieces in 1997 to 12 billion in 2023. In the past, each post office had two truck visits a day: one to drop off mail in the morning and another to pick up additional mail later in the day.
Under RTO, post offices more than 50 miles from their regional plant now have only one pickup and drop-off per day. Carriers still collect mail on the same schedule, but in many rural post offices, that mail is taken to the regional sorting center only once a day rather than twice. For mail posted or picked up by carriers later in the day, RTO will add an extra day to the delivery time.
This policy change is separate from recent and ongoing Trump administration efforts to restrict voting and mail-in voting, which have been subject to lengthy legal battles. Although the Supreme Court recently declined to intervene in a federal injunction barring the Postal Service from carrying out the administration's mail-voting provisions, the administration has signaled that it will continue to pursue this effort. Roughly 121 million of the country's 253 million voting-age adults in the 48 contiguous states and Washington, D.C., live nearest to a post office that will now have once-a-day pickup.
These post offices serve around 47% of all voting-age adults. To estimate the effects of the rule change, Patel focused on three states: California, North Carolina and Washington. Each held a primary election earlier this year and reports how many mail ballots voters in each county returned, how many were rejected and why, with late arrival recorded as a separate category.
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