In 17 states, the audit discovered, greater than 589,000 ballots had been despatched from election boards to voters after the state’s poll mailing
In 17 states, the audit discovered, greater than 589,000 ballots had been despatched from election boards to voters after the state’s poll mailing deadline. In 11 states, greater than 44,000 ballots had been despatched from election boards to voters the day of or the day earlier than the state’s major election.
One notably troubling state of affairs, auditors discovered, unfolded in Pennsylvania, the place 500 ballots had been despatched to voters the day after the election.
The inspector normal’s audit additionally discovered that solely 13 p.c of ballots had been mailed with the really helpful bar code monitoring expertise. The investigators flagged longstanding issues with election boards failing to take care of up to date voter recordsdata, that means voters’ addresses had been usually old-fashioned.
Moreover, the audit discovered issues in Baltimore. Although postal officers there “licensed that they had been away from election and political mail every day, our audit decided that political mail acquired on Might 12, 2020, sat unprocessed for 5 days, leading to about 68,000 political mail mailpieces not delivered on time,” the auditors wrote. They stated the mail was finally processed, however a lot later than it ought to have been.
Mr. DeJoy, who constructed a fortune within the non-public sector, started placing cost-cutting measures in place when he took over the Postal Service in June; mail supply slowed by as a lot as eight p.c. He backed off a few of his service cuts amid a firestorm of criticism and pledged to Congress final week that “we are going to do every little thing in our energy and construction to ship the ballots on time.”
David E. Williams, a Postal Service vice chairman in control of operations, wrote in response to the report that administration “largely agrees with the audit’s findings and proposals, and we reiterate our dedication to effectively course of the nation’s political and election mail, and to well timed ship such mail.”
The audit, dated Monday, is the second by the Postal Service inspector normal to look at errors made in the course of the 2020 major elections. Final month, auditors targeted on issues in Wisconsin, the place tons of of ballots had been left in tubs, unaccounted for, on the Milwaukee processing and distribution heart in the course of the state’s major in April. About 160 ballots had been erroneously returned to a neighborhood election workplace; one other 390 had points with the postmark, which led to confusion about whether or not they might be counted, the inspector normal discovered.