The U.S. Postal Service's capability could be what decides the November elections.
Election officials are sounding the alarm bells that the snail-mail service may not be fit to handle the volume of mail-in ballots this midterm cycle. An analysis published Monday by The New York Times revealed that more mail-in ballots were tossed in 2026 and 2025 than other years.
The Times examined some of the most heavily contested battlegrounds in 12 states—California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Nebraska, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Washington—and found that ballots were discarded for lateness at a higher rate than previously recorded.
In Wisconsin, the Times noted that late votes accounted for roughly 78 percent of all the tossed ballots during the spring primary season. In the last spring cycle in 2023, late ballots accounted for just 47 percent of the reject pile.
And earlier this month in Michigan, more than 10,000 ballots were thrown out for arriving after the state's 8 p.m. Election Day deadline, nearly double the number rejected in 2024.
The disparity has forced regional election officials to try to find new solutions to ensure Americans' votes count this November.
In Colorado, officials have built more mail-in ballot drop boxes so that denizens can have their ballots mailed early, increasing the total number of boxes by 78 percent since 2018.
"We did change the law last legislative session," Jena Griswold, the Democratic secretary of state, told the Times. "Mail ballots are going out sooner, and drop boxes are going out sooner. That is in direct response to the uncertainty coming from D.C. and Trump's attacks on our democracy."
The Postal Service rebuked the claim that its election-season services had become unreliable, telling the Times that more than 95 percent of mail-in ballots were received in time during recent elections.
"There are any number of factors that may impact the timeliness of a returned ballot," the statement said. "As such, our consistent message to voters who choose to vote by mail is to mail early."
The U.S. Postal Service is practically as old as the country. It was developed by the Second Continental Congress during the American Revolution, and Benjamin Franklin was appointed as its first postmaster general. Since then, the Postal Service has reinvented itself again and again, keeping up with the myriad shipping demands of the American public and supporting trillions of dollars in commerce while receiving zero tax dollars for its operations.
Still, that hasn't prevented America's public mail system from becoming a favorite target of the president. Since the throes of the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump has repeatedly argued that the Postal Service should be dismantled to prevent mail-in voting—a practice that he has repeatedly accused of fraud despite his own apparent preference to vote by mail.
Last week, the Supreme Court buoyed one of Donald Trump's more aggressive voter-suppression efforts, permitting the White House to move forward with an executive order that effectively transferred control of the mail-in voting process to Postmaster General David Steiner, who was appointed by Trump in July 2025.