Howdy folks.

Voting is underway across America as we enter the home stretch before the November election. What can you do to make sure your ballot is counted? Here’s a look at what’s in this edition:

‘Mail early:’ Election officials urge voters to get ballots in ASAP to avoid them being tossed out
Votebeat Brunch: A new examination of the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act
Texas election officials scramble to process voter registration backlog

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The U.S. Postal Service had enough problems even before President Donald Trump tried to transform the agency into a de facto election regulation hub that would have had the power to reject ballots heading to voters this November.

That plan was quashed by the Supreme Court after a tumultuous legal battle. But that hasn’t taken the spotlight off the Postal Service, which is still facing a lot of questions about how prepared it is to handle the massive flow of ballots moving around the country over the next four weeks.

The Postal Service has lost money for decades. Since 2007, the agency has lost $118 billion. Despite a mantra that “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” would keep the mail from getting through, the Postal Service is charging customers more and delivering some mail more slowly. Things are so bad that the Postmaster General has warned that the agency could run out of cash early next year.

The problems are a concern for tens of millions of Americans expected to vote by mail in this November’s elections. This year, the challenges could be compounded by belt-tightening measures that could lead to more ballots being rejected if voters aren’t paying attention.

The so-called Regional Transportation Optimization plan the agency rolled out last year has reduced pickup times at more than 15,000 post offices that are more than 50 miles from a regional processing center. That means a ballot could sit in a local post office and not get a postmark until the following day.

For people dropping off their ballots at the last minute, that could mean the difference between their votes being counted or rejected. The problems are likely to have the biggest impact on rural areas, which tend to be more likely to vote for Republicans.

Oregon has been an early case study in how the system works — or doesn’t. Oregon, which was the first state to shift to voting entirely by mail in 1998, was part of the Postal Service pilot project testing the consolidation process. The results were not encouraging. The Postal Service’s own audit found that performance declined and complaints increased.

Most importantly for voters, Oregon has seen an increase in ballots being rejected because they weren’t postmarked as required by Election Day. During the primary election this past May, more than 7,300 ballots that might have been counted when they came in after Election Day were rejected because they didn’t have a proper postmark, amounting to a 13% rejection rate, up from 9.5% in 2024.

That set off some alarm bells in Oregon, which is trying to address the problems and ensure that fewer ballots are rejected this November.

Leading the charge is Secretary of State Tobias Read, a Democrat who has worked to expand the state’s ballot drop box system, which operates independently of the Postal Service. Oregon has more than 320 drop boxes. More than 60% of all Oregon voters used drop boxes in 2024, but it’s much easier for people in urban areas to use them than those in rural areas, where it can take an hour or more to reach one. Read just got the state Legislature to add another 20 for the November election to help expand the system’s reach.

Read is so worried about postal delays that he’s encouraging people to send ballots back a week before the election or instead plan to secure a postmark or vote another way.

“We can’t count on it,” said Read, referring to the Postal Service. “It might work, but I don’t want anyone to be taking a chance with their ballot.”

Voters who send their ballots back close to Election Day should go into the post office and ask workers to manually postmark the ballot, Read said.

“It’s not that the Postal Service is something you should avoid,” he said. “Just do it early if you’re going to use the mail.”

The Postal Service itself is also encouraging voters to send their ballots back well before Election Day to ensure they are counted. The agency has a 90-second public service announcement on its website urging people to “mail early.” For some voters, the agency suggests that people send their ballots in at least a week before the deadline.

In Washington, Secretary of State Steve Hobbs is going further and urging people to send in their ballots 10 days before the deadlines to ensure that they aren’t rejected. The problem with ballots being rejected because of late postmarks skyrocketed in some Washington counties by more than 300% between the 2024 primary and the 2026 primary.

Like Read, Hobbs, a Democrat, is encouraging people to use a drop box to return their ballots - and make sure they make a plan to ensure their vote is counted.

“If you’re going to mail, you better do it right away,” he said. “Don’t wait.”

Votebeat Brunch: The evisceration of the Voting Rights Act and its impact

Michael Miller, a political science professor at Barnard College, and Kevin Morris, senior researcher at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, have spent years studying the impact of the Voting Rights Act and how court decisions have reshaped it.

Their new book, “An American Problem: How the Country Built—and the Supreme Court Broke—the Voting Rights Act,” offers a stark assessment of how the Supreme Court has neutered the landmark civil rights law. It focuses on the impact of the 2013 Supreme Court case, Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down the Voting Rights Act’s formula for deciding which jurisdictions had to get federal approval before changing voting laws, a process known as pre-clearance.

This week, Votebeat spoke to Miller about the book’s research and conclusions.

Your book finds that the turnout gap between Black and white voters widened because of the Shelby decision. What did you find?

We certainly find that Black and other minority voters are disadvantaged after Shelby. When we go through the period before Shelby, Black and white turnout are moving together. We call this parallel trend, and the turnout gap. And so we find that the gap explodes in the areas formerly subject to pre-clearance after Shelby County, relative to places that were never constrained by pre-clearance. And what that tells us is that the central premise of Shelby County – that things had changed so much in the South, that the old way of voter disenfranchisement would not return – that is a flawed premise, because we see it immediately, and the effects are growing. To quantify them, the number that we cite in the book is that, over time, the effect of Shelby County is hundreds of thousands of votes by minority voters that have gone uncast as a direct result of that decision.

You take a particular look at Texas in the book. What did you find?

We do two analyses in Texas. One of the analyses that we did is on ballots that were rejected as a direct result of SB1 [an overhaul of state voting laws passed in 2021]. We found racialized patterns there in terms of the rejection rates of ballots and applications, and we also found some downstream effects of this. So, if your ballot is rejected due to this law, you are downstream less likely to turn out to vote because you've been frustrated and you've been stopped from voting before. So this isn't just a one-election effect.

What do you see as the remedy for these problems?

I think we need to restore the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court has said that we can't do it by simply going back to the old 1965 list. But it does explicitly say that it's not hostile to a new pre-clearance formula, and there are any number of ways that we can devise them. But before we do that, we have to confront the very hard truth that, without a robust Voting Rights Act, we are seeing immediate, significant, and meaningful burdens on minority voters that result as a direct effect of the erosion of this law. So, what that coverage formula looks like should be up to Congress, but it's going to take actions by Congress in order to get this done. Whether the Supreme Court then looks at a new coverage formula and accepts it as a reasonable remedy, I can't say. But I think the evidence that we present in this book shows that it really should.