USPS Races the Clock on Mail Ballots With Extra Staff and 4am Starts

The US Postal Service is in the final sprint. With Election Day landing on Nov 3, the agency has stacked up extra staff, longer hours and special counters to make sure every mail-in ballot lands where it needs to. On Nov 1 it brought on additional workers just to collect, postmark and push ballots through faster. Crews are sweeping postal facilities daily — sometimes several times a day — hunting for any stragglers that still need a ride.

Some branches are staying open later, opening a dedicated "Ballot Postmark Only" line at retail counters and even offering drive-through ballot drop-offs. The agency is also running expedited handling, extra deliveries and special pickups. It's an all-hands moment for a service that has been hauling ballots since the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln pointed it at the job.

This cycle comes with extra heat. President Donald Trump ordered the agency to write rules barring ballot delivery in states that wouldn't hand over lists of eligible voters, and some voters got nervous about mailing their votes in. The Supreme Court blocked Trump and the USPS from enforcing those rules in September. With Republicans locked in a tight fight to keep Congress, and Democratic voters disproportionately casting ballots by mail, the stakes are obvious.

The volume tells the story. Over the last two months the USPS has delivered tens of millions of ballots plus a record 4.2 billion pieces of political marketing mail — the flyers pushing candidates and ballot measures — up by more than 300 million pieces over the 2024 election cycle. For comparison, it handled 99.2 million ballots to and from voters in the 2024 presidential race. About 30% of votes were cast by mail that November, down from 46% in 2020.

In Golden, Colorado, acting postmaster John Douglas has been clocking in at 4am, well before his usual start, to keep ballots moving. He says carriers check every box and every house in the closing days — even on streets with no mail that day. "We want to get everything home. We want to get everything delivered into the right hands," he said.

About 32km away, the Denver Processing and Distribution Center is chewing through tens of millions of political and election mail pieces; one day last week alone it handled 3.5 million political flyers. On Election Day, workers will make extra runs to postal facilities or drive out directly to grab the last ballots. The agency is juggling a blizzard of state rules, ballot designs and deadlines, and launched a portal — electionmail.org — so local officials can get real-time help. Amber McReynolds, chair of the USPS Board of Governors, said mail voting looks a bit higher than past midterms partly because some states sent ballots out earlier. Workers, she said, are "delivering democracy."