On Tuesday, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) scrapped a plan to reroute mail from Northern Nevada to a California-based processing center. Lawmakers and grassroots activists previously expressed concern the policy could jeopardize on-time arrival of mail-in ballots.
According to the Associated Press, “USPS said in a statement it has identified ‘enhanced efficiencies’ that will allow processing of single-piece mail to continue at the existing Reno postal facility.” The policy — which was originally set to take effect next year — would have “meant that all mail sent from the Reno area would pass through Sacramento before reaching its final destination — even from one side of the city to the other.”
As Ned Jones previously wrote in these pages, the USPS has been undergoing a restructuring since 2021 that seeks to “achieve financial sustainability and service excellence.” One of the biggest changes accompanying this overhaul is the consolidation of regional processing centers, “which means that in some cases, [mail-in ballots] from one state are sent to a center in a different, neighboring state to be processed.”
While reportedly effective at reducing costs, this policy has produced its negatives for states like Nevada and Utah, which predominantly conduct their elections by mail.
During the latter’s June primaries, for instance, nearly 1,200 voters in Southern Utah had their mail-in ballots discarded due to a postmark issue reportedly stemming from the USPS’s processing system. Local officials theorized that the ballots of these voters — who claimed to have mailed them in by
