With election season upon us, the nation is feeling the strain of competing priorities as health and democratic responsibilities conflict. One way to avoid the possibility of crowds at the polls is to vote by mail, a process that has been widely encouraged and made more accessible by a new law allowing all registered voters in Massachusetts to vote by mail without an excuse in 2020. This is a distinction from traditional absentee voting for which a voter must provide a valid excuse such as travel or hospitalization to qualify for a ballot that can be mailed in. However, many are now questioning whether the United States Postal Service is equipped to handle an influx of election mail, and local postal workers have been reluctant to respond to questions about slower, less consistent mail service reported by residents.
Nextdoor posts in response to a Press inquiry about the quality of local mail service showed that some residents of Harvard and neighboring towns have experienced delays or changes in mail delivery.
One Boxborough resident said she has noticed an increase in days on which she receives no mail as well as a pattern of receiving only junk mail on some days and only letters on others. A Devens woman said she has noticed a general delay in mail delivery, and a resident of Harvard and one of Boxborough reported issues receiving their mail-in ballots. “For the past several weeks I haven’t been getting any mail, not even junk mail,” wrote Joni Adamson of Boxborough. “It’s really a strange feeling, and not a good one.”
In a phone interview with the Press, Harvard resident and Select Board member Lucy Wallace said she has received her mail at a Harvard post office box for years, and never had problems until lately. In one case, bills that apparently never made it to her box resulted in the near-cancellation of two insurance policies. In another, two local charities—also with Harvard post office addresses—never received the checks she mailed.
Others, however, have seen no changes in their mail service. “Our mail comes and goes without a problem—same as always,” wrote Rob Ayres of Bolton. Vanessa Perini of Harvard wrote that she regularly ships small packages through the USPS for her online business and said her domestic customers have been satisfied with delivery times.
The Press reached out to the Harvard, Still River, and Bolton post offices, but employees at all three locations declined to comment on recent trends in mail delivery. Stephen Doherty, communications specialist for the USPS northeast area of Massachusetts, responded to inquiries with a press release from Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, in which DeJoy assured the public that retail hours at post offices will not change, mail processing equipment and blue boxes will remain where they are, no mail processing facilities will be closed, and overtime will continue to be approved “as needed.” When pressed further, Doherty replied that he did not “have any information to share beyond what is in our Postmaster General’s statement.”
This is despite recent reporting from WGBH that the USPS has removed at least a dozen mail sorting machines from operation and USPS public mailboxes have been removed from locations across Massachusetts. According to CNN, most of the removals had been planned to reflect a decrease in mail volume. However, many people have expressed concerns about the timing of the changes, since the sorting machines are responsible for processing most envelope mail, including mail-in ballots.
A fact sheet published by the National Association of Letter Carriers on Aug. 12 sought to reassure voters that they could count on the USPS this election season. “Even if every American voter returned his or her ballot by mail, the Postal Service has more than enough capacity to deliver the extra volume,” the sheet explains, pointing out that the economic depression caused by the pandemic has meant a reduction in mail volume, leaving room for an increase during election season.
No need to use the postal service. Ballots can be dropped off in a drop-box at Town Hall. (Courtesy photo)
The sheet also says that the USPS prioritizes election mail and monitors it more closely than regular first-class mail. The mailing envelopes for ballots have special barcodes and other identifiers to improve their visibility in the mail stream. The sheet also links to an article published in April by the news website The Hill, which reported that recent data has shown no more than seven to eight cases of voter fraud using mail-in ballots per year nationally: a number that translates to 0.00006 percent of votes cast.
Good news
For Harvard, this is good news, since many of the town’s 4,463 registered voters are opting for mail-in ballots. Based on the volume of election mail the town clerk’s office has been receiving, voter participation in Harvard will be especially high this year. According to Marlene Kenney, Harvard’s town clerk, her office has received almost 600 applications for absentee ballots and about 1,400 vote-by-mail applications for the Sept. 1 primaries. This is a staggering increase compared to the 2016 state primaries, when, she said, her office received 14 absentee ballot applications and 213 people voted at the polls; at the time, there were 4,308 registered voters in Harvard. (Mail-in ballots were first offered in 2020 to address the pandemic and were not offered in 2016.)
Kenney attributes the rise in votership to the ease of the mail-in voting process as well as the media buzz around the topic of voting by mail. She said people have been encouraged to vote by mail to decrease the density of voters at polls on election day, but that the movement for mail-in voting has also done a good job of increasing voter awareness and, subsequently, the likelihood that residents will apply for and fill out a ballot.
The influx of election mail has had Kenney and her assistant Catherine Bowen working weekends and nights. “It’s a lot more work than we would normally have during election season,” said Kenney. However, she is confident in their ability to get the ballots sent out, saying “it gives us some challenges but we’ll get it done.”
In preparing for the state primary election, Kenney and her assistants operated on a system of same-day turnaround, sending a ballot out on the same day her office received a mail-in application. Now, Kenney is urging voters to deliver those ballots in person to the Town Hall drop-box by 8 p.m., Sept. 1. “It’s the quickest way,” she said.
