The Postal Service is dismantling the delivery infrastructure that federal law requires it to maintain, and public confidence in mail-in ballot delivery has collapsed 13 points in two years.
The statute is not ambiguous. Under 39 U.S.C. § 403(b), the Postal Service carries a universal service obligation: provide postal services to all people of the United States. Related provisions require delivery to nearly every residential and business address at least six days a week. Congress embedded this duty to ensure that the federal mailing infrastructure binding the nation together — personal, commercial, governmental, and electoral — would not become a service rationed by geography or political convenience. The obligation is the floor. It is not aspirational.
The Delivering for America plan, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s ten-year restructuring initiative announced in 2021, claimed the Postal Reorganization Act as its authority and promised to modernize processing and transportation networks, improve service reliability, and achieve long-term financial sustainability — all while preserving the universal service mandate. That was the legal and institutional framing: efficiency in service of the statutory duty, not efficiency at the expense of it.
USPS’s own numbers, offered in a public statement this week, support the steelman. The agency says it delivered more than 233 million pieces of election mail through the end of August this fiscal year, with an on-time score of 97.94 percent. “There has been a lot of misinformation recently about the Postal Service’s role in the electoral process, which may have had an impact on public sentiment,” the agency said. “But the Postal Service’s actual performance metrics speak for themselves.” On the raw metric, the defense holds: a federal agency processing 233 million pieces of election mail at a 97.94 percent clip is performing close to the standard the statute was designed to ensure.
The voters do not experience the metric. They experience the mail.
A Government Accountability Office report found that the Delivering for America restructuring has pushed first-class delivery times longer and lowered the agency’s own service-performance goals — goals USPS has been unable to fully reach. The USPS Office of Inspector General concluded this month that despite the overhaul, the agency’s financial position has not improved and the reorganization has “disproportionately affected rural communities,” risking the loss of “customers who perceive the service as inequitable, which could harm its brand and reputation, and adversely affect revenue.” That is the inspector general’s own language, and it describes a universal service obligation failing on the inspector general’s own terms.
In Washington state, 19 counties saw their rate of ballots rejected due to late postmarks more than double between 2024 and this year’s primary — a direct result of how USPS changed its mail-processing operations under the restructuring. Those are ballots thrown out. The statute requires delivery to nearly every address; the operational changes USPS made under Delivering for America ensured that ballots arriving at processing facilities did not receive timely postmarks. The gap between the statutory obligation and the operational reality is now measured in rejected votes.
Public confidence tells the rest. A new NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found that trust in USPS delivering mail-in ballots on time dropped from 71 percent to 58 percent in two years — back to 2020 pandemic levels. A universal service obligation polling at crisis-level confidence on the one civic task where confidence is non-negotiable.
The partisan divide in the same poll is the most consequential finding. Seventy percent of Republican voters believe there is a great deal or good amount of fraud when people vote by mail. Eighteen percent of Democrats agree. The president votes by mail while publicly calling the system corrupt. A 2025 Brookings Institution review found mail-voting fraud to be exceptionally rare. The belief is not tracking evidence. It is tracking obedience.
On September 14 — the same days the poll was conducted — the Supreme Court blocked the administration’s attempt to use the Postal Service to restrict mail-in voting for the midterm elections. The court shut the procedural front. The structural damage was already in motion.
The structure is not accidental. Degrade the service. Change the postmark rules. Push delivery times longer. Set performance targets the agency cannot hit. Then let the polling record what voters concluded. The 13-point trust collapse is not a communications problem to be solved with a better USPS statement. It is the operational output of a restructuring plan that has spent five years hollowing out the infrastructure 39 U.S.C. § 403(b) was written to guarantee, layered over an information campaign that told voters the system was never trustworthy in the first place.
The honest response is not to ask voters to trust the Postal Service again. Trust in a stripped-down, restructured, politically weaponized agency is a rational response to what voters have observed. The honest response is to build voting infrastructure that does not depend on a single strained federal delivery network — ballot drop-box networks, prepaid ballot tracking, expanded early in-person voting — and to build it before November.