Missing Mail-In Ballots Case Unlikely to Affect Wisconsin

A court case involving U.S. Postal Service delays now appears unlikely to affect the final vote tally in Wisconsin in the race for president.

The Associated Press has declared former Vice President Joe Biden the winner of the state’s 10 electoral votes based on the total ballots cast in early, mail-in, absentee and Election Day voting. With votes counted from all but one community of 300 people, the Democratic candidate had a margin of a little more than 20,000 votes.

The USPS has acknowledged that more than 300,000 mail-in ballots had entered its system with no exit recorded, the Washington Post reported. USPS officials said that the lack of exit records for the ballots didn’t mean that they were misplaced, according to the Post, but that likely they had been sorted by hand, pulled for expedited delivery and simply not given an exit scan. It is not known if any of those ballots were processed at the USPS Lakeland facility, which serves most of Wisconsin.

On Tuesday, Election Day, federal Judge Emmet G. Sullivan in Washington, D.C., ordered the postal service to begin a sweep that afternoon of processing facilities serving 15 states, including Lakeland, in a search for mislaid mail-in ballots. Postal officials ignored the judge’s order, however, stating that to follow it would disrupt the agency’s scheduled daily review later Tuesday.

At a hearing on Wednesday, Sullivan angrily accused postal officials of “attempting to run the clock out on his order,” the Post reported. Sullivan is presiding over a lawsuit brought by voting rights groups against the postal service because of the delays in handling of mail-in ballots.

The newspaper stated that 8,000 of the ballots the USPS took for processing on Election Day were processed late, but did not indicate if any of them were processed at Lakeland.

Reprinted with permission of Wisconsin Examiner.