A former election official did the math on one part of the U.S. Postal Service’s new mail ballot rule, and found it could take years worth of work for Maricopa County, Arizona, to complete one part of the requirements.
The USPS estimated its yet-to-be-deployed ballot-scanning process takes generally less than a minute to verify each outgoing ballot. The county sends out about 2.6 million ballots on the first day of early voting.
“If it took one minute to verify each piece in the mailing, it would take about 4.9 years of continuous scanning to verify the whole mailing,” said Tammy Patrick, the county’s former federal compliance officer for elections and the current chief program officer for the National Association of Election Officials.
As nearly half the states ask courts to block the USPS ballot rules, those officials and other election experts have crunched the numbers on that scanning process to help show why carrying out the president’s mail ballot agenda is implausible in time for the November midterm elections.
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The rule stems from an executive order President Donald Trump signed in March. It requires states to submit the name, address and a unique barcode number for every eligible voter to a USPS portal, and then check that each outgoing ballot matches an entry on that list. The USPS said in its final rule that each outgoing ballot envelope must be scanned individually, with a member of election staff present to oversee the entire process.
Ann Jacobs, a former chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, looked at just one area, Milwaukee, which mailed out 33,567 ballots for the primary election. At a minute each, that’s about 70 days worth of work; if it took 30 seconds each, that’s about 35 days worth of work.
“A month of days of someone standing at a post office, watching a scanner. Heck, at 10 seconds each, it’s 93.25 hrs or 2 more than work weeks,” Jacobs wrote on social media. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but ballots go out 9/17/26 in Wisconsin - we don’t have 35 work days. This is true across the nation.”
In an interview with NOTUS, Jacobs said it would take a long time because the information has to go into an unknown database for matching.
“And they haven’t built this database. They haven’t built the infrastructure for it or the interface for it,” Jacobs said. “There is no ability of the post office to do what they’re proposing, as far as I can tell. There is no indication that they can do this in a timely fashion.”
Hilary Rudy, deputy state elections director in Colorado, said in a court declaration that — using USPS time estimates — it would take more than 66,000 hours worth of work for the agency to scan and cross-reference all 4 million of the state’s mail ballots. According to the Postal Service’s rule, an official from her office would have to remain physically present for that entire time.
Postal officials previously told NOTUS that USPS was rushing its new mailed ballot system without proper testing, which could produce widespread errors and result in disenfranchisement.
A federal court has temporarily blocked the Postal Service from requiring states to participate in the new system, but the mailing agency has said states can still elect to do so.
The Trump administration and some Republican states are appealing that decision, and the Supreme Court could still have the final word before the election in November.
In written testimony provided as part of various lawsuits, local election officials bringing one of the legal challenges said that time spent preparing envelopes for compliance with new USPS demands, uploading voter information into the still-to-come portal for the lists and waiting for the processing of ballots have made compliance with the Postal Service’s new demands a mathematical impossibility.
Dena Dawson, elections director for the Oregon secretary of state, estimated it would take 30 seconds to a minute to prepare each ballot to meet new regulations. In Oregon, all voters automatically receive a mail ballot.
“For 3 million ballots, that is between 25,000 and 50,000 hours of staff time,” Dawson said. “Needless to say, it would not be possible for me to recruit, hire, train, and deploy enough temporary staff to complete that work within the next six weeks, as my existing staff is already overextended with their regular preparations for the November 2026 general election.”
In a statement Tuesday, the Postal Service said it is still in the process of “finalizing the portal” that states will use to submit their voter lists. That is despite a whistleblower this week alleging postal management had set Sept. 1 as a hard deadline for the portal’s “go-live” date.
“The United States Postal Service has spent months developing a U.S. Federal Ballot Mail Portal to provide election officials with a simple, secure, and efficient way to share lists of individuals receiving ballots by mail in their respective states,” USPS said, adding it will provide states “tools, presentations and other resources” before the election.
In the meantime, front-line supervisors who will carry out the new rule are still in the dark. While the rule’s requirements mark a completely new procedure for USPS, postmasters who run the facilities that will receive ballots have yet to receive any guidance for carrying it out, according to a senior Postal Service official familiar with the matter.
According to the whistleblower, USPS’s effort to develop and deploy the portal has been “rushed,” “risky” and “haphazard” because leadership has set an impossible timeframe. In an effort to meet deadlines, USPS has eliminated standard and needed testing, the whistleblower said, thereby creating substantial risk of a “catastrophic failure” of the system that could “derail the midterm elections.”
The whistleblower added that the USPS IT team working on the project was largely operating without specific details on what they should build, and efforts to gain clarity were unsuccessful. Employees repeatedly raised concerns to leadership, the whistleblower said, but those went unaddressed.
By late August, the whistleblower said, it had become clear that the team would have limited time, if any, to test the product it was building — and would certainly have no time to fix any issues that arose during that testing.
USPS has tasked states with continually updating their lists as voters register, newly become eligible or ineligible, or die. Election officials said in various court filings that would create significant burdens on states, which would have to maintain constant interaction with each jurisdiction within its borders.
“Because ballot requests are usually made directly to local election offices rather than through a centralized state portal, this process will no doubt create delays in enrolling voters and, as a result, delays in mailing and receiving ballots,” said Patrick, the former Maricopa County official.
Rudy, the Colorado official, said that in 2024 her office sent out tens of thousands of ballots after its first batch. Continuing to enroll those individuals in the Postal Service’s portal would add thousands of hours of work for her staff.
“Costs aside, it will be near impossible for counties to complete this work even if they each hired hundreds of temporary employees,” Rudy said.
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