An official from the U.S. Postal Service was asked to address “boxes of ballots” in North Carolina and new sweeps of facilities in Texas on Wednesday following a heated hearing before a federal judge earlier in the day about the service’s handling of mail-in ballots.
Kevin Bray, the head of mail processing for the USPS, has just been sworn in and is taking questions now
— John Kruzel (@johnkruzel) November 4, 2020
During the hearing, plaintiffs asked operations specialist Kevin Bray to respond to a report they received from an election protection hotline, saying “that there may be boxes of ballots” at a mail facility in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Plaintiffs said the tip claimed there was about four days’ worth of ballots on a loading dock at the facility, according to Politico reporter Kyle Cheney. Bray said the Postal Service intends to look into it and will get back to the court.
If those ballots are found and postmarked on or before Election Day, they will be included in North Carolina’s final tally. The Supreme Court ruled that North Carolina can accept ballots up to nine days after Election Day as long as they’re postmarked by Nov. 3.
Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the Postal Service to “undertake an immediate sweep of the facility to identify any inbound ballots postmarked yesterday or earlier, and have such ballots sent out for delivery to local election offices” and conduct an additional sweep later in the day to identify any more ballots in the facilities.
Sullivan ordered the service to conduct similar “all clear” sweeps of facilities in key battleground states on Tuesday to ensure all ballots were delivered before polls closed on election night.
The Postal Service failed to comply with the Tuesday court order, and Sullivan did not refrain from expressing his displeasure during the hearing.
“In no uncertain terms, I’m not pleased about these 11th-hour developments last night,” Sullivan said, according to Buzzfeed’s Caroline O’Donovan. “You can tell your clients that. And someone might have a price to pay.”
In today’s USPS hearing on ballot delays & inspection, Judge Sullivan is hot out of the gate on the issue of the USPS’s : “In no uncertain terms, I”m not pleased about these 11th hour development last night. You can tell your clients that — and someone might have a price to pay.”
— Caroline O’Donovan (@ceodonovan) November 4, 2020
The Justice Department said that attempting to comply with Sullivan’s order would have been “impractical (given the size of that facility) and would take them away from their other pressing Election Mail related responsibilities,” according to a court filing.
“Given the time constraints set by this Court’s order, and the fact that Postal Inspectors operate on a nationwide basis, Defendants were unable to accelerate the daily review process to run from 12:30pm to 3:00pm without significantly disrupting preexisting activities on the day of the Election, something which Defendants did not understand the Court to invite or require,” the filing read.
Two issues took center stage during the hearing. The first was the Postal Service’s execution of the facilities sweeps mandated by Sullivan. O’Donovan tweeted that the plaintiffs in the case “are demanding to know what the USPS’s process for sweeping facilities actually is, and why given the ‘extraordinary measures’ in place since the weekend some postal facilities still did not meet service standards yesterday.”
Plaintiffs in the USPS case are demanding to know what the USPS’s process for sweeping facilities actually is, and why given the “extraordinary measures” in place since the weekend some postal facilities still did not meet service standards yesterday.
— Caroline O’Donovan (@ceodonovan) November 4, 2020
The Postal Service’s attorney said that the all-clear sweep “absolutely happened,” just not within the time frame prescribed by Sullivan,” according to Hill reporter John Kruzel.
USPS atty: Says the process Sullivan ordered “absolutely happened” last night in all facilities identified in the order
— John Kruzel (@johnkruzel) November 4, 2020
The other issue concerned a data report from the Postal Service showing that 300,000 ballots lacked a delivery scan the day before Election Day. The service has not reported delivery scan data from Election Day.
On Tuesday, the Postal Service said similar figures misrepresented the service’s delivery rates after it reported fewer on-time ballot deliveries for the fifth day in a row, claiming that the data was “not reliable.” As a result of expediting the ballot-delivery process, postal workers occasionally bypass parts of the normal delivery process, which means that some ballots that were delivered never receive the final delivery scan, according to Vice.
