Every two years the U.S. Postal Service is called to deliver for America’s national elections. As an OIG, we want to help ensure the Postal Service is prepared to fulfill this important responsibility, and afterward we want to know how well they did it.

Last week, we released our audit on the Postal Service’s service performance during the 2022 mid-term election. We found, overall, the Postal Service did a good job prioritizing the processing and delivery of Election Mail. Across the country, there is no one way that ballots are mailed out by election offices. So, although the Postal Service couldn’t identify or measure all ballots sent to voters, of the 82 million outbound ballots that could be measured and identified, 97.3 percent were delivered on time — an improvement over the 96.6 percent delivered on time in the 2020 election and the 95.6 percent in 2018.

For the mid-terms, the Postal Service implemented special checklists and logs and authorized overtime and additional transportation. As election day approached, the Postal Service implemented extraordinary measures such as holding ballots at the post office for pick-up by the election offices. The extra efforts incurred extra costs. Additionally, the USPS may have lost as much as $23 million in revenue by providing faster service than was paid for by treating ballots sent as Marketing Mail as First-Class Mail. Also, in our visits, we found facilities didn’t always comply with all USPS Election Mail policies, but this didn’t appear to have affected performance.

The Postal Service is exploring creating an Election Mail-specific product, that would support uniform mail processing of ballots, in response to a recommendation we made in 2020. In the meantime, we recommended that USPS develop a plan to analyze the additional costs they incurred and explore opportunities for compensation. USPS management agreed to do this if it pursues a new Election Mail product.

Did you vote by mail in the 2022 election? How was your experience? What can the Postal Service do to handle Election Mail better?