![]() But in that week, for a subset of ballots that are easily tracked, the Postal Service said it had on-time processing for about 87 percent of ballots being mailed to voters, and 95 percent for ballots returned by voters to election offices. 23, the Postal Service reported that only about 81 percent of first-class mail was on time, well below the service’s goal of 95 percent on-time delivery. Source: SnailWorksīut a delay of even one day for ballots in the final stretch of the presidential election could make the difference between a vote that is counted and one that is not, especially as legal fights continue in crucial states over whether to count ballots that are postmarked before Election Day but arriving after it.ĭata the Postal Service has turned over as part of a court challenge suggests that election mail is moving through the system faster than first-class mail over all. ![]() Long-distance mail represents first-class letters with a service standard of three days. ![]() Nearly all of the long-distance mail shown here - typically traveling to another state or across the country - has arrived within one week. As of last week, the Postal Service reported that mail volume for political mail and official election mail combined had surpassed 4.5 billion pieces, more than twice the volume from the 2016 election cycle.ĭuring the slowdown this year, both local and long-distance first-class mail have been on average less than one day late. ![]() This late crush of political mail includes campaign mailers and pamphlets from advocacy groups, which far outnumber official mailed ballots. “We tracked more than 200 million pieces of political mail in the last 10 days. “My guess is that delivery units are just choked with political mail,” Dave Lewis, the president of SnailWorks, said in an email. But it has tracked national trends measured by the Postal Service, and it provides a more timely estimate of mail performance than official statistics do on the eve of Election Day. The data is not fully representative of the postal network. With the help of SnailWorks, we are following mail originating in four cities around the country and sent nationwide. The data shown here follows roughly 31 million pieces of mail tracked by SnailWorks, a firm that monitors commercial mail for businesses, nonprofits and political campaigns from both parties. Local mail represents first-class letters with a service standard of two days. Justin Wolfers is a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.Note: Dates reflect delivery day. For more detail, read the Wolfers-Rothschild article, "Forecasting elections: voter intentions versus expectations." While most polling asks who respondents intend to vote for, Wolfers and co-author David Rothscshild (Microsoft Research) found, "over the last 60 years, poll questions that asked people which presidential candidate they expected to win have been a better guide to the outcome than questions asking people whom they planned to vote for." When asking for voters' beliefs on who will win the election, Rangel's lead widens, indicating that the primary might not actually be that close. Writing on Congressman Charles Rangel's reelection chances, Leonhardt (managing editor of The Upshot) uses Wolfers' research to argue that recent polls might show the primary challenge as closer than it actually is. "An indirect path to accuracy in election polling," a May 21 article by David Leonhardt for the New York Times' recently launched blog, The Upshot, cites work by Ford School Professor Justin Wolfers.
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