By Kari Mar
La Conner Community News
A ballot mailed in La Conner has only about 10 miles to travel to reach the Skagit County Elections office in Mount Vernon. But put it in a regular mailbox, and that short trip can become a multi-day, roughly 145-mile journey down Interstate 5 to the Postal Service’s Seattle Processing and Distribution Center in Tukwila and back.
That long detour, combined with a December Postal Service rule to wait to apply postmarks until mail arrives at the processing facilities, raised concerns that ballots could be rejected even if voters got them into the mail on time.
Now new data from the August primary suggests the risk might no longer be theoretical.
Skagit County rejected 636 ballots for being late in August, according to the Washington Secretary of State election dashboard. Late ballots accounted for 77% of the county’s 824 challenged ballots. In the 2024 primary, only 32% of the rejected ballots were thrown out because they arrived late.
Twenty-nine were from four precincts serving the immediate La Conner area. Four of the La Conner precinct’s five challenged ballots were too late. All 11 challenged ballots in the Snee Oosh precinct were late, along with nine of 11 in Shelter Bay and five of nine in the Swinomish precinct.
Skagit County Elections Manager Gabrielle Clay said she was expecting high rejection rates following the ones she saw in the February elections, but the primaries’ outcome was worse than she had anticipated.
“It’s extremely unfortunate,” she said. “I know the elections community all around the whole state (is) doing their best to count everything that we can count. If it’s postmarked late by law, there’s unfortunately nothing we can do about that.”
Local challenge, national problem
The numbers provide a local example of a problem emerging across rural America as the U.S. Postal Service attempts to cut costs by consolidating processing and reducing transportation.
Under the Postal Service’s Regional Transportation Optimization program, affected post offices more than 50 miles from a processing center receive one daily transportation run rather than two. La Conner is about 70 miles from the Tukwila processing facility.
That creates a gap between the time the Postal Service receives a ballot and the time it gives the envelope a postmark.
Mail deposited after the day’s transportation run may remain at the local post office until the following day. It must then travel to Tukwila and enter automated processing before receiving the postmark Washington uses to determine whether the ballot was mailed on time.
The Postal Service formalized that distinction in guidance that took effect in December. The agency says the guidance clarified existing practices rather than changing them.
The guidance states that a processing-center postmark reflects the date of the mailpiece’s first automated processing — not necessarily the date on which the Postal Service took possession of it. The Postal Service also acknowledges that transportation changes may prevent some mail from reaching a processing center on the day it was mailed.
For rural voters, the distance between those two events can determine whether their votes count.
Postal Service cost-cutting
The Postal Service’s changes are part of a larger effort to keep the financially troubled agency operating as Americans send less mail.
USPS reported $80.5 billion in operating revenue in fiscal 2025, a 1.2% increase driven largely by higher prices and growth in its Ground Advantage package business. But total mail and package volume fell 3.3%, and the agency posted a $9 billion net loss.
Postmaster General David Steiner told Congress in March that the Postal Service could exhaust its available cash within about a year without financial and operational changes.
Impact greater on rural areas
The agency says consolidating processing and reducing transportation will make its network more efficient. Rural publishers, residents and lawmakers across the country say those savings are coming at their expense.
In South Dakota, about 65% of newspaper publishers responding to a state association survey said delivery had worsened during the previous year. Publishers reported driving newspaper bundles to neighboring post offices themselves because papers mailed locally sometimes arrived after copies sent out of state.
Postal data examined by South Dakota News Watch showed that only about 58% of newspapers and periodicals sent to one rural ZIP code region arrived on time during the second quarter of 2026.
Vermont’s congressional delegation reported receiving more than 2,000 complaints about mail service this year, including accounts of residents receiving deliveries only once or twice a week. The complaints included delayed prescriptions and missing state vehicle titles.
In Illinois, Steiner acknowledged that the region between Chicago, St. Louis and Memphis was the Postal Service’s largest problem area. He attributed much of that region’s trouble to staffing shortages rather than the design of the mail network. Two-day First-Class Mail delivered on time in one central and southern Illinois congressional district fell from 92% in 2019 to about 83% in 2026.
The causes may differ by community, but the effects are concentrated in rural places where residents live farthest from processing centers and have the fewest alternatives.
No fixes for ‘late’ ballots
Ballots create a more immediate and measurable consequence: A late postmark cannot be fixed.
Washington voters whose ballots arrive with missing or mismatched signatures generally have an opportunity to correct the problem. A voter whose ballot receives a late postmark does not.
Election officials are therefore advising voters not to depend on Election Day mail collection. The safest option is to place a ballot in an official county drop box before 8 p.m. on Election Day.
Voters who use the mail should send their ballots at least one week or 10 days early, Clay said. A voter facing a close deadline may also take the ballot to a post office counter and request a manual postmark at no charge.
That manual postmark records the day the ballot was accepted locally. Without it, the date that matters may be the day the envelope reaches Tukwila.
Kari Mar is the editor and publisher of La Conner Community News.
