USPS Failed to Properly Handle Some Primary Election Ballots, Audit Finds

hn_acker 46 points 13 comments September 10, 2026
www.propublica.org · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (7 comments)

hn_acker

The original title is: > U.S. Postal Service Failed to Properly Handle Some Ballots During This Year’s Primary Elections, Audit Finds

db48x

> …deficiencies in how ballots were tracked and errors leading to delays, all of which risked ballots having incorrect postmarks or otherwise arriving late to election officials, which could lead to their rejection. This is one reason why mail–in ballots should all be barcoded. The USPS would scan the barcode each time the envelope was handled generating a history that shows how it made its way through the postal system. The history of any ballot that arrived late could be examined to find out where the postal system failed.

hyperhello

USPS Successfully Mishandles Specific Ballots

Refreeze5224

Of course they did. The president wants them to, he complains about mail-in voting (despite doing it himself yearly...), and thinks it helps his opponents. He also picked the postmaster general. None of this is news, and none of it is a conspiracy. He has made it explicit that this is what he wants, and he's doing it to disenfranchise people so his team wins.

ls612

I want to know what percent of normal mail gets mishandled at any stage of the process. The audit found that 99% of the election mail was handled by the book so that is what would tell me if this is just “the post office ain’t perfect” as opposed to there being malicious intent.

paxys

Well yeah, they’ve literally been (illegally) ordered to do this.

hn_acker

TFA does not suggest malicious intent on the part of USPS. When government bodies lower in the hierarchy receive foreseeably impractical (or malicious) orders from above, even a good faith effort to implement them will result in chaos.

Semantic search powered by Rivestack pgvector
6,164 stories · 56,060 chunks indexed