The Postal Service is implementing sweeping savings measures that will slow pickup and delivery times that now cover more than 42 percent of the continental United States.
This puts tens of thousands of unsuspecting mail-in voters at risk of being disenfranchised if they wait too long to drop off their mail-in ballots. The danger is particularly great for rural voters.
The United States Postal Service’s (USPS) new policy, known as Regional Transportation Optimization (RTO), will eliminate evening mail pickup at post offices located more than 50 miles from a regional processing facility, most of which are located in large urban areas. The changes mean that mail coming from these post offices will be postmarked – officially stamped with today’s date – and delivered at least a day later than before.
Election officials rely on postmarks to determine when voters mailed in their ballots. In the 15 states that provide grace periods for ballots mailed on Election Day but arriving within a certain number of days afterward, the postmark date often determines whether that vote is counted.
And in every state, a day’s delay in delivery means that if mail-in voters wait until a day or two before the election to mail their ballots — an unwise but common practice — they could be disenfranchised.
RTO will eventually cover approximately 70% of ZIP codes in the continental United States (given their locations, Alaska, Hawaii, and the U.S. territories generally operate under separate postal standards). According to a USPS update released Thursday by the Postal Regulatory Commission, RTO is now active in 61% of planned ZIP codes, or about 42.5% of all ZIP codes in the lower 48 states.
To help voters know if their mail-in ballots might be affected, Democracy Docket mapped these ZIP codes.
In a new federal rule issued last year, the USPS acknowledged the impact RTO would have on “third parties” like courts, banks, insurers, utility providers and election officials, who have long used postmarks to establish when mail has been delivered to the Postal Service in order to meet legal deadlines.
“The RTO initiative will make more common the scenario in which a postmark date does not match the date the Postal Service first accepted possession of a mail item,” the agency admitted.
Voters can ensure their ballots are postmarked when they mail them by delivering it in person to a post office and asking a postal worker to have it postmarked.
The USPS implemented new service standards, part of a broader suite of unsuccessful savings measures with the RTO, in April 2025. The agency added one day to expected delivery times for first-class mail in zip codes that would be affected by the RTO changes.
The USPS also changed its service standards for mail sent on a Saturday or the day before a holiday, essentially adding a day to the expected delivery date. While mail “delivered on Friday with a 3-day service standard will not exclude Sunday from the measure and will still have a scheduled delivery date of Monday,” the USPS explained in an online FAQ, “if a customer sends a letter on a Saturday with a 3-day service standard, the letter must be delivered on Wednesday (not Tuesday, as was the case before excluding Sunday from the measure change).”
This change – affecting all ZIP codes – obviously makes a huge difference for mail-in voters in the majority of states that do not have a grace period for late mail-in ballots.
Thursday’s update on the rollout indicates that RTO will not be activated in any new ZIP codes in October, meaning the updated list will remain accurate for mail-in voting until Election Day.
Late voting was already a problem even before the postal service cuts. Nearly 104,000 ballots were rejected in the 2024 general election because they arrived too late, according to federal data.
Still, postal changes appear to have a bigger impact this year. A recent Democracy Docket analysis of the 2026 primaries found that of more than 205,000 rejected mail-in ballots in six states that have released detailed rejection data, about 130,000 — or about 64% — were not counted because they were returned late to election officials. This represents a significantly higher percentage of late votes than in the 2024 presidential general election – 17.8% – or the 2022 midterm general election – 23.1%.
Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-) pointed to these changes to explain an uptick in rejected ballots in Washington state during the August primaries, which saw 19 counties’ rejection rates for late postmarks double compared to 2024.
Election officials are trying to publicize the changes. In New York, the state elections board is warning voters that ballots cast after the last posted collection time on Election Day may not be postmarked until the next business day. And the USPS now recommends sending completed ballots at least a week before Election Day.
According to Reuters, the USPS plans to extend hours at some branches and create “Ballot Postmark Only” lines at some retail locations this month to ensure mail-in ballots are delivered on time.
These measures were welcomed by defenders of the postal service.
“USPS is obviously aware of the postmark issue, and rather than just telling voters it’s up to you to request a same-day postmark, USPS is taking additional steps,” said Steve Hutkins, a retired New York University professor who runs the Save the Post Office website. “This will go a long way to preventing an increase in the number of ballots rejected due to a delay due to a late postmark.”
*Natalie Hausmann contributed to this report.
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