A former election official did the math on one part of the U.S. Postal Service’s new mail ballot rule, and found it could take years worth of work for Maricopa County, Arizona, to complete one part of the requirements.
The USPS estimated its yet-to-be-deployed ballot-scanning process takes generally less than a minute to verify each outgoing ballot. The county sends out about 2.6 million ballots on the first day of early voting.
“If it took one minute to verify each piece in the mailing, it would take about 4.9 years of continuous scanning to verify the whole mailing,” said Tammy Patrick, the county’s former federal compliance officer for elections and the current chief program officer for the National Association of Election Officials.