As States Prepared Mail-in Ballots, Postal Service Failed to Update at Least 1.8 Million Addresses

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Exclusive: As States Prepared Mail-in Ballots, Postal Service Failed to Update at Least 1.8 Million Addresses
By Eric Lichtblau
September 28, 2020 6:00 AM EDT


For three weeks in August, as election officials across the country were preparing to send out mail-in ballots to tens of millions of voters, the U.S. Postal Service stopped fully updating a national change of address system that most states use to keep their voter rolls current, according to multiple officials who use the system. A USPS spokesperson acknowledged the failure in response to questions from TIME, and said that at least 1.8 million new changes of address had not been registered in the database.

It is not clear to what extent the failure, which has not been previously reported, could compromise Americans’ ability to vote in this fall’s election. In normal times, hundreds of thousands of people move every week, and those numbers have increased during the COVID pandemic, which has forced millions of people, particularly young adults, to relocate at higher rates than usual, according to public polling and news reports. As of early June, some 3% of adults had moved and 6% had someone move in with them because of the pandemic, according to a Pew survey. That, and concern about the health risks of voting in person, experts from both parties say, will mean an unprecedented reliance on mail-in voting this year.

Several states contacted by TIME were unaware of the change-of-address problem. Officials in Minnesota, for one, sent out their ballot applications by mail earlier in September based partly on information drawn from the faulty database in August, the state’s election officials say. Other states had to delay sending out their ballots as they scrambled to fix incorrect addresses. At least 43 states plus the District of Columbia use the USPS change of address database. Many, like Minnesota, face close presidential contests, including Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

The postal service says it fixed the change-of-address issue and restored the missing data on Sept. 14. The USPS spokesperson, Martha Johnson, said the problem did not impact mail carriers’ ability to forward “eligible” mail to a new address. Many states ban the forwarding of election ballots from an old address, however, and the Postal Service did not respond to requests for clarification on the failure’s potential impact on the election. Internal USPS emails shared with TIME describe the source of the problem only as an unexplained “error”.

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https://time.com/5893881/exclusive-as-states-prepared-mail-in-ballots-postal-service-failed-to-update-at-least-1-8-million-addresses/