The Postal Service is slowing delivery. Will your mail ballot be affected?

The Postal Service is implementing broad cost-saving measures that will slow pick-up and delivery times that now cover more than 42% of the continental United States.

That puts tens of thousands of unsuspecting mail voters at risk of disenfranchisement if they wait too long to drop their ballot in the mail. The danger is particularly great for rural voters.

The new U.S. Postal Service (USPS) policy, known as Regional Transportation Optimization (RTO), will eliminate evening mail pickups from post offices more than 50 miles away from a regional processing facility, most of which are located in major urban areas. The changes mean that mail from those post offices will be postmarked — officially stamped with that day’s date — and delivered at least one day later than before.

Election officials rely on postmarks to determine when voters mailed their ballots. In the 15 states with grace periods for ballots that were mailed by or on Election Day but arrive within a set number of days after, the postmark date often determines whether that vote gets counted. 

And in every state, a day’s delay in delivery means that if mail voters wait until the last day or two before the election to mail their ballot — an ill-advised but common practice — they could be disenfranchised.

RTO will eventually cover around 70% of the zip codes in the continental United States (given their locations, Alaska, Hawaii, and the U.S. territories usually operate under separate postal standards). According to a USPS update posted by the Postal Regulatory Commission Thursday, the RTO is now active in 61% of the planned zip codes, or about 42.5% of all zip codes across the lower 48 states.

To help voters find out whether their mail ballots might be affected, Democracy Docket mapped those zip codes.

In a new federal rule published last year, 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 was handed over to the Postal Service for compliance with legal deadlines. 

“RTO initiative will make the scenario where a postmark date does not align with the date that the Postal Service first accepted possession of a mailpiece more common,” the agency admitted.

Voters can ensure their ballots get a postmark when they mail them by delivering it to a post office in person and asking a postal employee to postmark it.

USPS implemented new service standards, part of a broader suite of unsuccessful cost-saving measures along with RTO, in April 2025. The agency added a day to expected delivery times for first class mail in ZIP codes that would be impacted by the RTO changes. 

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 “tendered on Friday that has a 3-day service standard will not exclude Sunday from measurement and will still have an expected delivery date of Monday,” USPS explained in an online FAQ, “if a customer sends a letter on a Saturday that has a 3-day Service Standard, the letter should be delivered on Wednesday (not Tuesday, as was the case before excluding Sunday from the measurement change).”

That change — affecting all ZIP codes — obviously makes a huge difference for mail voters in the majority of states that don’t have grace periods for late-arriving mail ballots. 

Thursday’s update on the rollout noted that RTO won’t be activated in any new ZIP codes in October, meaning the updated list will remain accurate for mail voting through Election Day

Late ballots were already a problem even before the postal service reductions. Nearly 104,000 ballots were rejected in the 2024 general election because they arrived too late, according to federal data. 

Still, the postal changes seem to be having a larger impact this year. A recent Democracy Docket analysis of the 2026 primaries found that out of more than 205,000 rejected mail ballots across six states that published detailed data on rejections, around 130,000 — roughly 64% — went uncounted because they were returned to election officials late. That’s a significantly higher percentage of late ballots than during the 2024 presidential general election — 17.8% — or the 2022 midterm general election — 23.1%.

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D) pointed to the changes to explain an uptick in Washington State’s rejected ballots during the August primary, which saw 19 counties’ rejection rates for late postmarks double compared to 2024. 

Election officials are trying to get the word out about the changes. In New York, the state elections board is warning voters that ballots deposited after the last posted collection time on Election Day may not receive a postmark until the following business day. And USPS now recommends mailing completed ballots at least one week before Election Day.

According to Reuters, USPS is planning to extend hours at certain branches and create “Ballot Postmark Only” lines at certain retail locations this month to help ensure mail votes are delivered in time.