‘Use an official ballot drop box’: KIRO hosts warn Washington voters after USPS postmark rule change leads to more rejected ballots

A change in how the U.S. Postal Service postmarks mail is causing more Washington ballots to be rejected and left uncounted.

“It’s because of the new rules in terms of what late means,” KIRO fill-in host Angela Poe Russell said on “The Gee and Ursula Show.” “The Postal Service, the change driving all this, has to do with a new rule that the postmark date isn’t the same as when the Postal Service accepts possession.”

The rule, finalized by USPS in December, changed where and when mail gets its postmark. Mail from post offices located more than 50 miles from a regional processing center may now be transported there only once a day instead of twice, meaning a ballot dropped in the mail can sit for a day or more before it’s ever stamped. Washington only counts a mailed ballot if it’s postmarked on or before Election Day, so a delay in postmarking can disqualify a ballot the voter mailed on time.

“Well, what does a postmark date mean now anyway? It doesn’t really mean anything,” KIRO fill-in host Jim Dever said.

“That’s the thing, it’s changing,” Russell said, citing a Washington State Standard report on the rule’s impact. “Rural counties were extremely impacted by this: Lewis, Franklin, Okanogan, and Yakima saw a tripling of late ballots that couldn’t be counted. In Mason and Stevens counties the number quadrupled, and about half of the counties in the state it doubled.”

More than 20,000 ballots were rejected for late postmarks in Washington’s August primary, up from about 16,131 in the 2024 primary, even though overall turnout was lower this year. Statewide, the rejection rate rose 32% year over year. The state’s most populous counties, including King, Spokane, Pierce, and Clark, actually saw fewer late-postmark rejections this cycle.

“The advice for midterms is to use an official ballot drop box,” Russell said. “Or send your ballot a week before Election Day, and/or you can just always go to the post office, but go there early.”

Dever said the change caught him personally off guard, after years of relying on Election Day mail drops.

“Normally, I would just not worry about it. I’d put it in the mailbox even on Election Day,” Dever said. “This year my wife said we have to do it a week earlier, and I was like, no, that doesn’t sound right, because of course I’m ill-informed. A lot of people out there weren’t aware of this new policy and the way the post office is working or not working.”

Whistleblower shares troubling insights from March executive order for mail-in

Beyond the postmark issue, Russell raised a separate concern tied to a new USPS ballot-tracking system connected to a March executive order from President Donald Trump restricting mail-in voting. A whistleblower has warned the system uses barcodes that, if even one is misread in a batch, could cause the whole batch to be rejected.

“They had launched this new online portal, and it normally would take a year to complete, and they were trying to do it in three months,” Russell said. “If one barcode is off, they’ll throw out a batch of 10,000 ballots. Are we bringing a sword to a gunfight?”

“The opponents of mail-in balloting would like it to not work,” Dever said. “So if you can make the post office less efficient in this regard, it actually buttresses their argument that mail-in voting is unreliable. They’re making it unreliable by making the post office work a little less efficiently.”

Co-host Andrew Lanier added that the new system creates a separate risk, since the federal government has acknowledged in court that it doesn’t have a complete voter roll to check ballots against.

“They have admitted before the courts that they cannot verify and don’t have a complete list of every eligible voter in the country,” Lanier said. “You get one envelope that’s wrong, according to them, then 10,000 get thrown out.”

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

Listen to Gee and Ursula on “The Gee and Ursula Show” weekday mornings from 9 am to 12 pm on KIRO Newsradio.