Elections Chief Warns on Mail-in Ballots

VA's Commissioner of Elections' concerns to Privileges & Elections committee echoes ongoing issues about USPS reliability with election mail. Plus: VA will get a post-election "audit."

In this issue of EPEC Team newsletter:

—U.S. Postal Service is a Threat: Commissioner Beals

—About the Types of Risk Limiting Audit for the U.S. Senate Race

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U.S. Postal Service Called a Threat to the 2024 Election

Virginia’s Commissioner of Elections is flagging widely documented problems with the U.S. Postal Service as her biggest security concern ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

During a legislative hearing of the Virginia Assembly Wednesday, a delegate asked Susan Beals her take on the biggest threat to the upcoming general election?

Her response: The operational performance of the United States Postal Service.

She continued during the Privileges & Elections committee hearing:

Election officials depend on the U.S. Mail service to deliver ballots to voters and to return ballots to election officials to be counted. We started actually raising concerns with the USPS prior to last November's election. Virginia was a little bit of a canary in the coal mine on the issue of USPS and their performance because we had that statewide election in 2023 and a lot of other states did not.

We started hearing from registrars that they were having issues with mail ballots not being delivered to voters, not getting them back in time. Ballots coming back as being undeliverable to voters who have been in the same place for a very long time and have not moved.

The Elections department reached out to the USPS about delivery issues from the 2023 election, she said, when people mailed ballots back to election offices, only to have them returned “undeliverable.”

They followed up with members of the Congressional delegation, key legislative committees, and state election directors:

Since that time, we've seen a big ramp up and an acknowledgement from a lot of states that they're having issues with this transformation that USPS underwent. And I think that it's been frustrating for us because every time we've raised issues, we've been assured that they're going to be addressed. And then the subsequent elections, we're not necessarily seeing them get addressed. We're seeing some of the same issues.

The USPS delivery problems have been widely documented across states such as Minnesota, Utah, and the Commonwealth of Virginia.

In April, members of Virginia’s Congressional delegation issued a statement calling out the “lack of coordination between USPS and staff at the Richmond Regional Processing and Distribution Center (RPDC).”

Their statement was critical of the postal service’s “10-year Delivering for America” plan to consolidate processing centers across the country.

EPEC Team’s own research of the past four years of balloting in Virginia shows a 25% failure rate for tabulating By-Mail Absentee.

In August, the Office of Inspector General released an audit report showing that most postal facilities it reviewed were not following procedures for handling election mail.

“The USPS has effectively become the largest precinct in our elections; yet as the audit highlights, the agency is ill-prepared for the timely processing and delivery of Election and Political Mail for the 2024 general election,” wrote Ned Jones of the Citizens Election Research Center (CERC).

Postal service officials held a media briefing in late August to outline their prep for the 2024 general election, and its plan to enhance the “timely delivery of mail-in ballots entered close to or on Election Day and/or the state’s ballot return deadline.”

Beals’ advice to voters who choose to vote by mail: plan farther ahead. ~

Risk Limiting Audit — Ballot-Polling Method

Call it a good news, bad news outcome for proponents of a statewide audit following the 2024 election.

Per Virginia statute, the State Board of Elections voted this week to conduct a Risk Limiting Audit of the U.S. Senate race in Virginia’s presidential election.

The race between incumbent Democrat Tim Kaine and Republican Hung Cao was the only statewide contest left to choose after Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin struck a budget deal with the Democrat-led assembly that tossed out funding for a risk-limiting audit of the presidential results.

RLAs are used to check on the accuracy of tabulators used to scan and count ballots. The results are used in a statistical probability calculation to determine if all was well with the election.

As it has done in elections’ past, the board voted to go with the “ballot-polling” method instead of a “batch-comparison” method that a Republican board member had supported in the 4-1 vote.

So what’s the difference?

According to ELECT’s training overview of Risk Limiting Audits:

“Ballot-polling audits manually review a randomly selected, sufficiently large sample of ballots to determine if the overall outcome of an election contest was correctly reported.”

How many ballots will be chosen to randomly sample?

Much of that answer depends on the localities chosen, and whether they are equipped with the right tools to read the “cast vote records” (CVR) of tabulators, as technology experts explain of extraction methods.

The batch comparison method, by contrast, manually reviews “randomly selected physical batches of ballots, such as those cast in one precinct, and [compares] those results with corresponding machine counts.”

With the Batch Comparison method, election officials are able to look at the running totals and review the ballots in the order they were cast. This helps spot anomalies, such as a lack of randomness in the tallies.

Republicans hold a 3-2 majority on the electoral board. The 4-1 vote for the RLA delivered a statewide race, which they supported. The vote also gave Democrats the ballot-sampling method they preferred. ~

In our next edition of EPEC Team, more analysis about securing elections, voter-roll clean up efforts, and how voters can be ready when the 45-day voting stretch kicks off in two weeks.

For now, that’s a wrap. #