Judge Pushes US Postal Service To Ensure All Remaining Election Ballots Delivered
A judge on Wednesday said he wants to ensure all remaining ballots for the closely contested U.S. election are delivered, demanding that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy answer questions about why the postal service…
A judge on Wednesday said he wants to ensure all remaining ballots for the closely contested U.S. election are delivered, demanding that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy answer questions about why the Postal Service failed to complete a court-ordered sweep for undelivered ballots.
“The pressing issues are where are the ballots and how do we get them delivered so they can be counted,” U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said in concluding a hearing that included testimony from U.S. Postal Service (USPS) official Kevin Bray who answered questions about ballot deliveries.
Many states are accepting ballots for up to a week after Election Day Tuesday as long as they were postmarked by then. Ballots are still being counted by election officials in battleground states in the contest between Republican President Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
The Postal Service is carrying out sweeps and using priority mail networks through Saturday to deliver any remaining ballots. It said on Wednesday that it had completed sweeps late on Tuesday ordered by the judge and turned up just 13 ballots, all of them in Pennsylvania.
Sullivan had said that DeJoy, a Trump appointee and previously a Republican Party fundraiser, “is either going to have to be deposed or appear before me and testify under oath about why some measures were not taken.”
Sullivan had ordered the sweeps in response to lawsuits by groups including Vote Forward, the NAACP, and Latino community advocates.
The USPS told Sullivan it could not meet his 3 p.m. EST (2000 GMT) Tuesday deadline, saying it was not logistically possible.