Terry Gerton You have got a new paper out that is so timely. A lot of people are starting to think about the midterms. It’s, here we are in August, ballots are getting printed, early voting will start soon, and yet the post office of all organizations is in the center of the conversation. Talk to us about why the Postal Service has become such an important player in the ongoing debate over voting and election administration.

Elena Patel Yeah, I think the Postal Service, this is one of the areas in which it’s really a quiet backbone of democracy. And I think people don’t think a lot about the Postal Service, which is exactly how it’s supposed to work. It does all of its work in the background, taking ballots from election administrators to the people who have requested their mail-in ballot, and then back again to be counted. And that’s the role they’ve always done. They’ve always done it very well. I think that the pandemic put a lot of pressure on the Postal Service, really to rise to meet the challenge of the 2020 election and exactly what that environment was. And again, they rose to meet that challenge and they helped, in an administrative capacity, our election system. And I think it’s important to keep in mind that it’s not a single election system as we’re coming up to the midterm elections. It’s actually 8,000 different jurisdictions that the Postal Service is helping each of them move their ballots through the system so that voters can vote in whatever way is permissible according to state rules.

Terry Gerton And that’s a really key point here. I think the Postal Service is a federal agency. Elections are run by states and counties and across the country, there are very different approaches to mail-in ballots. Walk us through some of the data that you’ve seen.

Elena Patel In 2024, about 30 percent of people voted by mail. There’s a ton of heterogeneity in who does that though. And what I mean by that is that in certain states, mail in ballots are automatically sent to every single voter. Utah is one of those states, a state where I used to live, and in those states where the ballots automatically go out, a lot of people choose, I would imagine for convenience reasons or whatever they might decide, to vote by mail. And so in those states, there are some states where 90 percent vote by mail but it’s because they are mailed automatically. In other states there are requirements. You might need to specify a reason why you need to vote by mail and you can request the mail-in ballot and that variation is a hallmark of our system which is as you’ve noted the states and the localities decide the parameters of the elections for their citizens and the postal service is just there to help them facilitate that process.

Terry Gerton And your paper points to a recent Supreme Court ruling that has really increased the relevance of some postal practices in controlling elections. Talk us through that.

Elena Patel Yeah, so the Supreme Court case that was recently decided about a month ago was whether it is legal for an election official to count a ballot that arrives after election day. And so it was really a question about, what does election day mean, and why might ballots arrive after election day and how does that involve the postal service? Well, the postal service applies a postmark to most mail. It’s that little stamp. That gets stamped on your letter at the top that says, this stamp has been used, you can’t reuse it. It’s really a processing mark, but it’s a date that indicates affirmatively when the Postal Service received a piece of mail in the system. And elections, like many other legal processes, rely on that stamp to say, this piece of email entered a specific date, and therefore it’s on time for whatever system is happening in the background. In the case of ballots, there are several states that say, as long as you’ve postmarked your mail-in ballot by election day, it will be still counted as long as it arrives within three, five, seven days after election. And so officials need to wait actually for all the mail-in ballots to come in before they can really finalize the vote count. And that was the legal question, whether it is permissible for election officials to count ballots that have been postmarked by election day but arrive later. And ultimately that’s what the Supreme Court decided, that that is a legal process that states can avail themselves of. Not all states do, this is a state process.

Terry Gerton Elena Patel is co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and a senior fellow in the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution. But Elena, this issue around the postmark is really crucial, because it’s now an essential date validation at a time when the Postal Service itself is cutting back its capacity to postmark mail.

Elena Patel Yes, they’re struggling. They have a real business model problem right now and they’re asking Congress to help them ensure the Postal Service can stay the system that it has been for hundreds of years in the future, just like it has existed for hundreds of years. They are facing a cashflow shortage. They don’t raise revenue by people mailing letters like they used to because a lot of us have moved a lot communication online and they really need Congress to rethink their business model. And what that has to do with the postmark is that in order to improve efficiency in the system, everybody should be for that. We want an efficient postal operator, just like we want a universal postal operator. They’ve been changing the way mail moves through the system, consolidating processing at sort of like bigger spokes in the systems. So mail travels a little bit further to run through the machines that, for example, stamp the mail to say the postal service has received it. So the postal services has let people know this. On Christmas day, they said, Hey. you might think that the stamp arrives as soon as you put it in the blue box and somebody picks it up, but that’s not actually true. There might be a delay with some of the reconsolidation that we’ve done in the network. And so it might not be for a day or two after you’ve dropped your ballot or your mail piece that it gets a stamp. And the postal service has been very transparent about this, and they have said to voters, for example, if you need a date today when you drop your ballot, you can go to the counter and ask the mail clerk to hand cancel your mail with the stamp. So they are trying as an administrator of election systems, like many other processes that they support, trying to help the public navigate the backend business work that they’re doing by reminding people you can, for example, hand cancel or stamp your mail. The problem is that not everybody has the time or ability or capacity to get to a post office and a retail counter during business hours to stamp their mail. And so while I think there are processes in place to help people get around the consolidation and the effect of that. It’s not equally available to everybody. And so there are many people, I think, that are rightly questioning, why can’t you hand cancel my mail in the post office as an administrator of systems to indicate that my mail piece arrived on time?

Terry Gerton So that’s one and a really important one point of intersection and perhaps disconnect between the responsibilities of the Postal Service and elections and its capacity to support them. The second I want to pull out a little bit is, the Trump administration’s really been highly critical of mail voting. The president is advocating for the SAVE Act focused on election integrity. And that can put potentially a whole new set of responsibilities on the postal service, not just to deliver the mail, but to decide who gets the mail. That seems a stretch. Tell us how that would function.

Elena Patel Yeah, this is really an unprecedented change that is being imposed by the administration through executive order. So as part of the pieces that go with the SAVE Act, what the president has required of the Postal Service is that they not only move the ballots through the system, but when ballots are mailed out, that they check every ballot against a nationally maintained eligible voter list and not deliver ballots for somebody who’s not on the list that they’ve produced. And this is problematic for a whole variety of reasons. One, most fundamentally, it’s taking the Postal Service out of this neutral administrator and putting it into a role that I describe as election bouncers. And I don’t think we want our letter carriers to be in that position. It also really is transferring power from local election officials to the federal government in a way that I think is inconsistent with the way that we run our elections. They are maintained, the processes are maintained, the lists are generated by these local election officials. And this is really fundamentally moving that power to D.C. And I think that is the legal question here. And it actually is something that the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on. And one hopes that they weigh in quickly because the longer the decision takes, the closer we get to the midterm elections. And then there’ll be a process scramble for the postal service if they do in fact need to be doing this election bouncing work.

Terry Gerton So I just want to, I guess, footstomp or ask you to footstomp again, that is back to a topic we talked about at the beginning, a conflict between the federal role in elections and the state role in the elections. But regardless of how that sorts out, it’s also just a pure capacity problem for the post office. What are the practical implications of that if the rule would go into effect?

Elena Patel At a time when the postmaster general is now not making payments to retirement accounts to fund retirement benefits for postal retirees to preserve cash, any change in process costs money. I’ve not seen any estimate of how much this will cost, but it’s a disruption in the work that the postal service does, and that’s going to be costly. There’s also a cost to the voters that is really important to keep in mind, which is that these lists that are produced, they have known flaws in them. So there is, for example, a study that showed that in a single county in Texas, 14% of the people flagged as non-eligible voters were actually eligible. And for that 14% percent of people in that county, that means that when the ballots get mailed out, there’s just get handed back to election officials. They never go out, even though they’re supposed to be receiving a ballot. And that is some of the cost of taking what is a very complex process that states and localities, I think, work very hard to manage for the specification of their particular area and handing it to the federal government. We just don’t have the federal systems in place to do this without error. And so now you’re in the position of people not getting ballots who really were supposed to be getting ballots.

Terry Gerton Your report does a great job of taking these concerns and building them out and talking about them in practical language that we can all kind of get our heads around. But speaking of getting their heads around, what are the policy issues that Congress needs to be thinking about now? We’ve got elections right on the horizon. We’ve the big presidential election two years from now. None of these changes happen overnight. What do you want to see them take on from a policy or a resourcing perspective?

Elena Patel I think there’s two concrete things that are worth Congress thinking about in the short run and the long run. The long run question is the thing that you and I have talked about before that I think anybody who pays attention to postal knows is an issue, which is, we have not really revamped the Postal Service’s funding model since it was created in 1971. And it’s time, 2026 is a different era than 1971. The mail is different and the postal service is national infrastructure. And so Congress really needs to decide what the Postal Service is doing on behalf of everybody in this country and fund them appropriately. In the short term, what I most worry about is this creeping between the postmark and the systems that rely on the post mark. And the Postal Service has changed its postmarking practice by postmarking at these consolidated facilities that are further away for business reasons. It’s related to that long-term problem I told you. But I do think Congress should be asking the Postal Service to go back to retaining the cancelation of mail or postmarking at the local post offices, because elections, legal systems, appeals processes, all of these legal processes administratively rely on that postmark to indicate when mail was received. And that’s what national infrastructure is. It is there to support all of our systems. And as these things pull apart, I think that Congress needs to push them back together.